Abortion law may up political heat in Fla.
In a move that could produce a huge political battle and become a major issue in the 2022 elections, the president of the Florida Senate said Thursday the Legislature would consider enacting a Texasstate style law effectively banning most abortions.
The new Texas law bans abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy, a point at which many women don’t know they’re pregnant. It empowers anyone to sue
anyone else who in any way provides any kind of help to a woman seeking an abortion after that point, even a rideshare driver who takes someone to have the procedure.
“The Texas law represents a new approach and the fact that the Supreme Court didn’t block it from taking effect is encouraging,” Senate President Wilton Simpson, R-Trilby, said in a statement. “As an adoptive child myself, it’s important to me that we do everything we can to promote adoption and prevent abortion; therefore, I think it’s worthwhile to take a look at the Texas law and see if there is more we can do here in Florida.”
Democrats immediately sounded the alarm about what may be coming in the next session of the state Legislature. Several termed it “draconian.”
“Any attempt to emulate the Texas abortion ban is an all-out assault on women’s rights,” said Florida Senate Democratic Leader Lauren Book of Plantation.
“These kinds of measures are draconian, cruel, and have no place in a modern society. So long as the bodily autonomy and self-determination of women are under attack, I vow to give those who seek to oppress reproductive rights the fight of their lives — for my daughter, for myself, for fellow survivors, and women everywhere. They cannot win,” she said.
Republicans control the Florida House and Senate. If Republicans, most of whom are anti-abortion, want to pass such a law, there is little the Democrats, most of whom favor abortion rights, can do to stop it.
“I think it’s a very big threat,” said state Sen. Lori Berman, a Palm Beach County Democrat who is part of her party’s Senate leadership team. Berman said it would be difficult for Democrats to find five Republicans willing to join them in opposing the measure if it gets a vote in the Senate next year.
But it’s unclear how much Republicans want to have the fight. It could energize voters in the Republican Party’s base — but also ignite a reaction that could prompt Democrats to get more interested in voting next year.
Gov. Ron DeSantis emphasized his anti-abortion beliefs on Thursday, but he also sounded less than enthusiastic about taking up the issue.
“We’ve been able to do pro-life legislation. I’m pro-life. I welcome pro-life legislation. What they did in Texas was interesting,” he said at a news conference in West Palm Beach, declining to say if he supports enacting the same kind of law in Florida. “I’ve always been somebody that really does support protections for life as best as we can do.”
DeSantis, a Harvardtrained lawyer, is widely seen as detail-oriented on policy issues. At the news conference, he said he wasn’t all that up to speed on the Texas law. He did, however, offer details on his interpretation of the action taken by the Supreme Court in allowing the Texas law to go into effect.
“I haven’t been really able to look at enough about it. They’ve basically done this through a private right of action. And so, it’s a little bit different than how these debates have gone. We’ll have to look, I’m going to look more significantly at it,” he said.
Like DeSantis and Simpson, House Speaker Chris Sprowls, R-Palm Harbor, emphasized his opposition to abortion in a statement Thursday. But he avoided taking a position on the legislation or indicating if he would allow the House to consider it.
“In Florida, we agree that killing an innocent human being with a beating heart is wrong. It is why we have worked every session to strengthen protections for unborn babies, including those for unborn children with disabilities last session, and it is why I am confident that those who share this moral view in the Florida House will continue the fight,” Sprowls said.
Immediately after the Texas law went into effect Wednesday with acquiescence of the Supreme Court, state Rep. Anthony Sabatini, a Lake County Republican who is running for Congress next year, promised to reintroduce the legislation, and applied heat to his own party’s leaders.
Sabatini said he’s been “fighting the radical left and the weak Republican establishment” on the issue and decried the “RINOs in Tallahassee [who] have stopped progress every step of the way. It’s time to put them on the record and ensure a vote of the House immediately.”
RINO, which stands for Republicans in name only, is a derisive term conservatives and populists use to apply to more establishment-oriented Republicans.
Political implications
The politics of the issue are tricky for Republicans.
A Quinnipiac University Poll in October found 68% of Florida voters said they agreed with the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade that established a woman’s right to an abortion, and 23% disagreed. That’s about the same as the nationwide results in October, 66%-27%.
In Florida, 43% of Republicans said they agreed with Roe v. Wade and 46% opposed. Democrats agreed 90%-6% and independents agreed 72%-18%.
Statewide elections in Florida are often won by small margins. Seven statewide elections in the decade starting with 2012 were decided by less than 1.2% of the vote. In 2018, DeSantis won by 0.4% of the vote.
If one side can energize and turn out voters better than the other, that can translate into an election victory. Turnout falls from presidential years to midterm elections, but usually Democratic turnout usually declines more than Republican turnout.
Democratic strategist Andrew Dolberg, director of strategic initiatives with the firm MDW Communications, said the issue could mobilize his party’s voters.
“Politically speaking, it is a topic that Democrats will rally around,” he said. “Democrats are going to get riled up about the actual threat now that Roe v. Wade has effectively been nullified.”
Berman said Republicans “could wake the sleeping giant by trying to pass something this extreme in Florida.”
Older women voters remember an era in which abortion was illegal, but younger women haven’t felt the significance of the threat to abortion rights.
“They’ve taken it for granted for this entire time. And if they wake up and realize that right could be taken away, there could be huge movement,” she said. “Many of us remember before Roe v. Wade. And we are not going to return the era of backroom abortions where people were maimed and killed.”