The Florida Supreme Court has decided to move forward with the six-week abortion ban.
According to reports, this ban allows “one of the country’s strictest and most far-reaching abortion bans to go into effect in 30 days.” Back in 2022, Florida Governor, Republican Ron DeSantis signed a 15-week abortion ban into law which was met with a lot of backlash.
The following year, he signed the 6-week ban which was believed would have the same reaction as the first bill. The Supreme Court Justice’s ruling states, “The Florida Constitution guarantees ‘the right to be let alone and free from governmental intrusion into…private life.’…In this case, we are asked to determine if there is a conflict between the rights secured by this provision and a recently amended statute that shortens the window of time in which a physician may perform an abortion.”
The opinion continued, “[W]e conclude there is no basis under the Privacy Clause to invalidate the statute. In doing so, we recede from our prior decisions in which—relying on reasoning the U.S. Supreme Court has rejected—we held that the Privacy Clause guaranteed the right to receive an abortion through the end of the second trimester.”
This vote was 6-1 with Justice Jorge Labarga being the dissenting vote. In his 30 page dissent he wrote, “I am convinced that in 1980 (when voters approved the privacy provision at issue as its own amendment), a Florida voter would have understood that the proposed privacy amendment included broad protections for abortion.”
He continued, “There’s substantial evidence that overwhelmingly supports the conclusion that the public understood the right of privacy to encompass the right to an abortion…the dominance of Roe in the public discourse makes it inconceivable that in 1980, Florida voters did not associate abortion with the right of privacy.”
What are your thoughts on this?