Abortion rights protesters warn ‘Don’t Texas my Florida’

I knew an editor once, an ambitious sort, who was quite affable when we came across one another. But I couldn’t escape the feeling that his cordiality was based more on self-interest than an affinity for the likes of me.

Invariably, he’d promise to treat me to lunch.

But never that day. Evangelicals and others wanting to outlaw abortion must have harbored similar doubts after years of hearing Florida Republican Party glad-handers promise, in return for their support, to snuff out the right to choose. But never that year.

GOP strategists have long known that they could spout anti-abortion rhetoric to a certain constituency and that they could introduce legislation to curtail reproductive rights without political consequences. They knew that the federal judiciary would quickly invalidate legislation that undid abortion rights.

In a way, Roe v. Wade has been a kind of insurance policy for Republican politicians worried about provoking a furious backlash if they denied women voters a right they’ve cherished since 1973. Thanks to the Supreme Court, pols could talk the talk without the peril of walking the walk.

Then Donald Trump ruined their pretense by appointing three very conservative Supreme Court justices known to be skeptical of Roe v. Wade. Last month, the reconstituted court signaled that the debate over abortion rights was no longer political theater. A 5-4 majority refused to block a draconian Texas law that the Biden administration argued in a brief filed last week “virtually eliminated access to abortion in Texas after six weeks of pregnancy.” (Six weeks in, women often have no idea they’re pregnant.)

The Texas law also includes a bizarre vigilante enforcement provision, which, instead of criminal penalties, encourages private citizens to sue anyone they suspect of “aiding and abetting” an abortion for damages of at least

$10,000 plus legal expenses. Potential targets of such litigation could include clinic workers, someone who loans a patient money to pay her abortion expenses, even an Uber driver who transports the woman to an abortion clinic. (Uber and Lyft have both promised to pay the legal expenses of drivers snagged by the Texas statute.) Actual patients are spared legal liability, a clever provision that legal scholars claim was designed to deny affected women standing in court challenges.

After the Supreme Court failed to block the Texas law, a Volusia County state representative quickly introduced a Florida version. (Albeit, slightly less awful, given that unlike the Texas law, the Florida bill would allow exceptions for pregnancies induced by rape or incest.)

As filed, the Florida legislation would empower an abortion snitch to pursue a court case up to six years after an alleged illegal pregnancy was terminated, a length of time that exceeds Florida’s statute of limitations for civil lawsuits claiming wrongful deaths, false imprisonment, assault, medical malpractice and other serious transgressions. Key Florida GOP senators are on record as opposing a vigilante provision. We’ll be watching.

Meanwhile, a 4-3 majority of the Manatee County Commission, ignoring protesters in the commission chamber garbed in the red hoods and white bonnets of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” voted to ask the state attorney for help in fashioning a local ordinance to create a local “safe haven” for “developing children who are inside their mother’s womb.” (A symbolic gesture, I suppose, since Manatee County has no abortion clinics.)

The proposed state law drew a quick and angry reaction. On Oct. 2, thousands of women staged abortion rights demonstrations across Florida, gathering in Fort Lauderdale, Miami, West Palm Beach, Delray Beach, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Jacksonville, Naples, Clearwater, Tarpon Springs, Punta Gorda, Bradenton, Fort Myers, Melbourne, Pensacola and Tallahassee. Some protesters carried signs demanding: “Don’t Texas my Florida.”

So far, the governor and other Republican leaders in Florida have not expressed much enthusiasm for the Texas-style bill, perhaps worried that the issue will rouse young women voters — well over 60% of whom support abortion rights — from their usual political apathy in next year’s midterm elections.

Their political strategists must cringe at the prospect of bounty hunters meddling in the lives of pregnant women, like a scene out of some dystopian novel.

Plus, reigniting the right-to-choose abortion fight in Florida will only recall the state’s murderous history of anti-abortion violence. I’m guessing Republicans with political ambitions would rather not discuss the series of abortion clinic bombings in Florida in the

1980s or the murders of two doctors and a volunteer outside their respective Pensacola clinics in 1993 and 1994.

As the U.S. Supreme Court moves toward tossing Roe v. Wade and allowing individual state legislatures to decide whether to curtail women’s reproductive rights, I imagine GOP pols are already nostalgic for the days when they could assure Florida’s fervent pro-life minority that, sure, they intended to ban abortion.

But never that year.