Pro-life advocates are warning that the wording of a proposed abortion amendment to Florida’s Constitution is crafted to “trick” voters into supporting the measure.
The amendment was drafted by and petitioned for by Floridians Protecting Freedom (FPF), a statewide alliance of pro-abortion organizations working to limit government regulations on abortion. After winning approval from the Florida Supreme Court, the amendment will appear on Florida’s ballot in November.
The proposed amendment, dubbed “The Limiting Government Interference with Abortions,” says, “No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.”
The critics say the wording is so ambiguous that it could remove all restrictions on abortion in the Sunshine State right up to the point of birth.
Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody filed a brief with the Florida Supreme Court on Oct. 31, 2023, arguing that FPF intentionally drafted a “misleading ballot summary to trick voters” into voting for the amendment.”
Mat Staver, the founder and chairman of Maitland-based Liberty Counsel, told The Epoch Times that his organization is “very opposed to the amendment.”
“It is a very radical, extreme, deceptive amendment that would overturn every law related to abortion, except for parental notification,” he said. “That includes parental consent, informed consent, waiting periods, doctor qualifications, and health and safety regulations.”
Mr. Staver also noted that, under the new amendment, abortion practitioners would no longer be required to be licensed physicians.
“Abortion practitioners will be totally unregulated, and women would essentially be cast into backyard abortion pushers that will have no regulation whatsoever,” he said.
Lynda Bell—president and spokesperson for Florida Right to Life and a co-founder of Do No Harm Florida—said the measure, known specifically as Amendment 4, “is definitely the single most dangerous amendment that has ever been proposed in the State of Florida’s history.”
In an interview with The Epoch Times, she was critical of the four male justices—Chief Justice Carlos G. Muñiz and Justices Charles Canady, Jorge Labarga, and John D. Couriel—who ruled to allow the amendment on the ballot for Florida’s November election.
The four justices wrote that “there is no basis for concluding that the proposed amendment is facially invalid under the United States Constitution.”
“Shame on them,” Ms. Bell said of the justices. “This amendment is anything but clear and ambiguous. So, this is their fault. But now that we’re here, we have to fight this.”
Justices Jamie R. Grosshans, Renatha Francis, and Meredith Sasso voted against allowing the amendment on the ballot. They cited what they termed ambiguous wording.
Ms. Bell said it’s the “deceptive nature of the language” that makes the amendment so “dangerous.”
When most people see the words, “healthcare provider,” they assume it means “physician,” she said. When they hear the words “parental notification,” they assume it means “parental consent,” she said.
When they see the word “viability,” most will assume there are limits as to when you can abort a child. And when most see the word, “healthcare,” she said, most think of “life” care.
Allowing this ambiguous language would eliminate “every single law” Florida has enacted that sets limits, thus allowing abortions up to the moment of birth, she said.
That includes the 2020 law that “prohibits a physician from performing an abortion on a minor” without a form of written, notarized consent from the parent or guardian and “proof of identification” that they are the parent or legal guardian.
“Parental consent would be gone,” Ms. Bell said.
Exceptions in Law Called ‘Cruel Deception’
Advocates of Amendment 4 contend that the amendment will limit government interference in a woman’s right to access an abortion in Florida.
“The world would be such a better place if abortion access were easy and safe,” said Dr. Chelsea Daniels, a pro-abortion advocate for Physicians for Reproductive Health and a spokesperson for the Yes on 4 campaign.
In a May 1 press release, she called the current Florida law a “near-total abortion ban,” saying it strips away “needed options from patients and their health care providers.”
She said the exceptions provided for rape and incest are “a cruel deception designed to fail women and girls when they are most in need.”
“The fact is, we can never know what someone else is going through—we’re not in their shoes,” Ms. Daniels said.
“That’s why we must vote YES: to keep the government out of our exam rooms and make sure Florida families and their doctors have the freedom to make the decisions that are right for them.”
Sara Latshaw, deputy political director of the ACLU of Florida, called the amendment ballot ruling “a triumph for democracy in Florida.”
“In the face of a six-week abortion ban, Floridians now have the chance to assert their will at the ballot box, shaping a Florida that is free from government interference in abortion,” she said in an April 1 press release.
Kara Gross, legislative director and senior policy counsel of the ACLU of Florida, said the “vast majority” of Florida Republicans and Democrats want the government to stay out of it.
“Amendment 4 will ensure that personal medical decisions will be between pregnant patients and their health care providers, and not politicians,” Ms. Gross said.
The full text of the measure clarifies that Article X, Section 22 of the State’s Constitution is the only existing law that will be exempt from the scope of the amendment.
That section makes it clear that Florida’s legislature “shall not limit or deny the privacy right guaranteed to a minor under the United States Constitution as interpreted by the United States Supreme Court.”
The legislature is also authorized to require, with exceptions, that a minor’s parent or guardian be notified “before the termination of the minor’s pregnancy.”
The exceptions are related to providing life-saving measures if the parent or guardian cannot be reached.
The amendment ballot summary says it “does not change” the notification requirement.
The Florida Alliance of Planned Parenthood Affiliates has partnered with FPF on its “Yes on 4′ campaign to get the amendment passed.
Progress Florida—a nonprofit that promotes “progressive values” through media outreach and collaboration with Florida’s top liberal organizations—also promoted the campaign and provided FPF’s political advertisement promoting the effort.
‘Effort to Hoodwink’
In Florida Attorney General Moody’s brief with the Florida Supreme Court, she argued that “This effort to hoodwink the Florida electorate should be rebuffed.”
She described that ballot summary as being “part of a similar overall design to lay ticking time bombs,” intentionally using vague language that will later enable abortion advocates to argue that the amendment’s scope reaches beyond what voters believed.
Ms. Moody further argued that the ballot summary violates one of the crucial prerequisites stated in Florida law to qualify an amendment initiative—that it makes clear to voters “the chief purpose of the measure” in “clear and unambiguous language.”
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“The ballot summary fails this requirement in multiple ways,” she wrote, citing the words “viability” and “patient’s health” as undefined and therefore open to broad interpretation.
In addition, she says, the strategic placement of a comma before the phrase “as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider” could—”under some interpretive canons employed by lawyers and judges”—change the meanings of both “before viability” and “when necessary to protect the patient’s health.”
This could enable the “healthcare provider” to decide autonomously whether an abortion is “necessary to protect the patient’s health.”
The failure to clarify the meaning of “healthcare provider” could move beyond “physician” to include “any staff involved in some way in caring for the patient at a medical facility or abortion clinic.”
For these and other reasons, Ms. Moody concluded that The Limiting Government Interference with Abortion initiative “should be stricken from the ballot.”
Florida’s Abortion Laws
Florida—the third-largest state by population—has approximately 50 clinics, providing around 84,000 abortions in 2023. Almost 8,000 of those abortions were for women from outside the state.
Florida has enacted a series of abortion laws over the past three years.
The newest measure—filed as a bill in March 2023—was signed into law by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis without public notice in his office in the presence of supporters at around 11 p.m. on April 13, 2023.
The measure prohibits physicians from “knowingly performing or inducing” an abortion after six weeks.
The law provides exceptions for pregnancies that result from rape, incest, or human trafficking. In those instances, however, women are required to provide documentation, such as a restraining order, medical record, or police report.
The law provides exceptions to save the mother’s life and also for fatal fetal abnormalities discovered before the third trimester.
The six-week ban was contingent upon the Florida Supreme Court first upholding the 15-week ban, which Mr. DeSantis signed into law on April 14, 2022. The measure was challenged by Planned Parenthood in June 2022.
Planned Parenthood announced on Jan. 23, 2023, that the Florida Supreme Court had accepted their petition to hear oral arguments in their case, which took place on Sept. 8, 2023.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Florida and the national ACLU participated in the lawsuit.
Florida’s Supreme Court upheld the 15-week law by a vote of 6-1 this past April 1.
The seven justices ruled that the Florida Constitution’s privacy clause does not “guarantee the right to an abortion through the end of the second trimester.”
“Those legal arguments on the privacy clause’s meaning are, in our view, distinct from the serious moral, ethical, and policy issues that are implicated in the subject matter of this case,” Justice Jamie Grosshans wrote for the majority.
“After considering each of these sources and consistent with longstanding principles of judicial deference to legislative enactments, we conclude there is no basis under the privacy clause to invalidate the statute.”
This started a 30-day countdown for the six-week ban to become law, which came to pass on May 1.
A bill signed into law in 2015 requires women seeking an abortion to have at least two in-person appointments with the abortion provider at least 24 hours apart. On the first visit, the pregnant woman will have lab work done. She will also receive an ultrasound and be provided information on other options information. She must also meet with the physician to discuss the abortion procedure.
The second visit, 24 hours later, is when the abortion will be performed.
Until the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022, abortion was legal in Florida after 24 weeks.
In the case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992, the Supreme Court affirmed what it called the central holding of Roe v. Wade: that states cannot prohibit abortions before fetal viability, which was defined as the point when a fetus could survive outside the womb. Roe v. Wade defined “viability” as “23 weeks.”
The Epoch Times reached out to Floridians Protecting Freedom, Planned Parenthood, and the American Civil Liberties Union for comment.