An ad campaign supporting an upcoming abortion ballot initiative will be allowed to remain on the air, despite containing objectively false information about abortion laws in Florida.
Earlier this month, the Florida Department of Health sent a cease-and-desist letter to local TV stations over the ad from Floridians Protecting Freedom, which featured a woman named Caroline. Though the information in the ad was misleading at best, and intentionally dishonest at worst, a judge said it should still be allowed to air due to the coalition’s First Amendment rights.
“The government cannot excuse its indirect censorship of political speech simply by declaring the disfavored speech is ‘false,’” Judge Mark E. Walker wrote. “To keep it simple for the State of Florida: it’s the First Amendment, stupid.”
While the First Amendment does protect political speech, the problem with the ad is that it does, in fact, contain patent falsehoods, seemingly meant to scare voters into supporting the abortion amendment.
In the ad, a woman named Caroline says she was diagnosed with a brain tumor while pregnant, and had an abortion. Yet she claimed that current laws protecting preborn children in Florida would prevent her from having that abortion today. “The doctors knew if I did not end my pregnancy, I would lose my baby, I would lose my life and my daughter would lose her mom,” Caroline says in the ad. Then, the provably false claim: “Florida has now banned abortion even in cases like mine.”
As noted by Governor Ron DeSantis in response to the ad, state law actually does allow abortion for health emergencies. Regardless of Caroline’s specific situation, Florida’s law, HB7, which restricts abortion after the preborn child’s first detectable heartbeat, states that one of the exceptions to the law is when “There is a medical necessity for legitimate emergency medical procedures for termination of the pregnancy to save the pregnant woman’s life or avert a serious risk of imminent, substantial, and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman other than a psychological condition” (emphasis added).
However, an induced abortion — the intentional and direct killing of a preborn child — would not have even been necessary to save Caroline’s life. By the time Caroline received her diagnosis, she was 21 weeks pregnant, which is far enough along that she could have undergone a preterm delivery if doctors felt the pregnancy would be too dangerous. This would have given both her and her baby the chance to survive.
Let’s be clear about what we mean by induced abortion:
Micro-preemies at 21 weeks are surviving more often, and there are six hospitals in Florida currently equipped to care for them. Even if her child had not survived the premature birth, it would still not have been an abortion, either; the goal would have been to save both lives, not to intentionally take one of them.
Research has likewise found that pregnant women with glioblastomas can undergo brain surgery without risking their lives, or that of their babies. Abortion is not a recommended “treatment” for pregnant women with glioblastoma. It’s not known if Caroline was given this information by her doctors and simply chose to have an abortion anyway. But if she wasn’t, then she was utterly failed by her medical team.
Amendment 4 would make abortion a “right” in Florida’s constitution, adding the language: “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 health care provider” (emphasis added).
This language, which is extremely broad and vague, would allow abortions to be committed throughout all 40 weeks of pregnancy, so long as a doctor attests that the abortion is necessary for the mother’s “health.”
The goal of Amendment 4 is not to ensure that women with life-threatening pregnancy-related conditions, like ectopic pregnancy, can receive the legitimate medical treatment they need — because women can already get treatment for these things. It’s to make abortion not only legal, but widely available at any point during pregnancy due to broad language loopholes.
Floridians Protecting Freedom, the group behind the ad, was not being honest. Now, Judge Walker has laid the foundation for any political group to be allowed to blatantly lie to voters under the guise of free speech.
