Florida groups push to get abortion rights into state’s constitution

ORLANDO, Fla. — Abortion rights groups are working to get a referendum on the 2024 ballot that would enshrine access to abortion in the Florida Constitution, a measure designed to sidestep Republican control of the issue in Tallahassee.

Recent votes in Republican-leaning states have shown that there are sizable majorities who will back abortion rights if they are put to a vote of the people.

But more money needs to be raised, and time is running out if the Florida activists want to get the nearly 900,000 valid signatures needed by the Feb. 1 deadline. And all the while, a conservative state Supreme Court could torpedo the campaign at any time.

“The Florida Legislature has not made it easy for groups to qualify measures for the ballot,” said Daniel A. Smith, the political science chair at the University of Florida. “And that is quite intentional.”

Laura Goodhue, executive director of the Florida Alliance of Planned Parenthood Affiliates, said she was confident the measure would succeed in 2024.

“We don’t want Floridians to suffer needlessly just because of the whims of politicians,” Goodhue said. “People need access to abortion care now. They can’t wait.”

The proposed amendment, from the group Floridians Protecting Freedom, states that “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.”

Viability is defined in Florida law as the stage of development when a fetus is sustainable outside the womb through “standard medical measures,” usually considered to be at about 24 weeks.

The measure would not change parental notification laws.

If it makes the ballot and gets 60% of the vote in November 2024, the amendment would supersede the six-week abortion ban signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis earlier this year that has yet to go into effect because of legal challenges.

Broad ‘coalition’

The campaign includes national groups such as Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, and healthcare union SEIU, Goodhue said, as well as local nonprofits such as Florida Rising and Women’s Voices Of SW Florida.

“There’s been a coalition of activists, patients, providers, doctors, people of color, community organizers, even before the ballot initiative, working on issues in the Legislature,” Goodhue said. “So it wasn’t hard to convene those groups and say, ‘Hey, what’s our next step?’”

The campaign has already gathered about 600,000 of the 891,523 signatures needed to make the 2024 ballot, she said.

But only about 300,000 of them have been validated by the state so far, and experts said many more signatures than the official threshold need to be gathered to offset ones that don’t pass muster.

Still, they’ve gotten enough signatures to trigger a judicial review by the state Supreme Court and a financial impact review by the state attorney general’s office.

“I think it’s going really well,” said Matt Isbell, a Democratic elections analyst. “And it does show that there’s a lot of energy, I really don’t see any reason they won’t be able to get the petition threshold they need in time.”

But Smith noted that recent laws have added more restrictions on the amendment process, including giving the attorney general more power to interfere with reviews, increasing the signatures necessary to trigger a review, and a ban on paying canvassers per signature.

“It’s a very high hurdle,” Smith said. “It’s going to hinge on whether or not paid signature gatherers are going to be able to come into the state with the type of dollars that are needed to attract them to come to Florida.”

The “very tight” deadline for valid signatures makes it even more difficult, Smith said, and competing ballot measures in Florida and initiatives in other states only drive up the price for professional signature-gathering firms.

“This measure is not going to qualify with just volunteers,” he said. “It’s going to require skilled labor coming in to collect signatures, and it remains to be seen whether or not we’re going to see the investment to make that happen.”

More money needed

The campaign has so far raised $8.3 million out of the $19 million considered necessary to run a successful campaign, Goodhue said. Groups such as Planned Parenthood and the ACLU have given tens of thousands of dollars, while individual donors range from the $1 million donated by South Florida philanthropist Marsha Laufer to 73 donations of just $10.

“All of the organizations that are participating are committed, as well as people across the country that want to see abortion access protected in the South and in Florida,” Goodhue said. “It’s a broad reach to reach $19 million.”

The next potential roadblock is court review. Its task is to decide if the amendment language is clear enough to go on the ballot.

Lynda Bell, the president of the anti-abortion group Florida Right to Life, said she wants the court to look at “how vague this ballot language is.”

“They literally have a couple of sentences, and that’s the entire summary,” Bell said. “And the problem with this is that it just talks about ‘to protect the patient’s health.’ And nowhere does it talk about the patient’s life. ‘Health’ could mean anything. … I think it’s very deceptive.”

The Florida Supreme Court is already involved in the abortion battle, having heard oral arguments last week on a legal challenge to a 15-week abortion ban signed into law by DeSantis last year. If justices uphold that law, the newer six-week ban would take effect 30 days later.

Most of the questions revolved around what the definition of the state constitution’s right to “privacy” entails, and abortion rights advocates were not optimistic that the challenge would succeed.

But Goodhue was still confident that the high court would approve the proposed measure’s language. Florida law requires any initiative to have “a logical and natural oneness of purpose” that doesn’t substantially alter any government functions, and simple and clear wording that would inform voters on what it would do.

“The summary and the amendment itself take up less than half a page,” she said. “You’ve been to the polls before, look at the referendums [that have been] long and complicated. … I think we’ll be fine there.”

The proposed amendment is also “very, very Florida-specific,” Goodhue said, and not based on any other ballot measures around the country.

Potential conflicts on the high court have raised concerns among abortion rights advocates.

Justice Charles Canady’s wife, state Rep. Jennifer Canady, R-Lakeland, co-sponsored the six-week abortion ban, while Justice Jamie R. Grosshans was a member of the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian anti-abortion legal group .

Overall, DeSantis has appointed five of the seven justices, all of them members of the conservative Federalist Society.

But Goodhue said she believed the justices would be fair and uphold precedents when it came to the review.

‘Tricky to circumvent’

Isbell acknowledged that the state Supreme Court justices basically can do “whatever they want” when it comes to finding a reason to reject or slow down the initiative, but finding a legitimate reason would be difficult.

“The language would be pretty tricky to circumvent, especially since it also lays out that it still doesn’t affect the restriction on minors without parental or guardian support,” Isbell said.

If the campaign surmounts all obstacles in its path and does make it onto the ballot in November 2024, Isbell said it has a good chance of passing despite the state’s increasingly tilting to the GOP.

Anti-abortion initiatives failed in 2022 in Kansas, Kentucky and Montana, and earlier this year the increasingly red state of Ohio rejected an amendment that would have raised the voter threshold for ballot initiatives from 50% to 60%, designed largely to stem a proposed abortion rights amendment next year.

“It really does show how much the public has shifted on this,” Isbell said of the aftermath of the Dobbs ruling last year by the U.S. Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade, which guaranteed abortion rights nationwide.

“I think part of the issue is the horror stories that have come out of the post-Roe world have turned off a lot of what I would call soft pro-Life voters,” he said. “… I think it just makes a lot of voters who maybe otherwise would consider themselves a middle ground on this issue being like, ‘I’m not going to let these politicians decide stuff.’”

Bell, though, said she thinks the amendments failed because voters in those states wanted to keep the status quo, which would bode well for her side in Florida.

“Those were trying to be pro-life amendments, so they’re the exact opposite of this [one],” Bell said. “I think that they failed because people have an aversion, very often, to changing their constitution, period.”

Bell said that her group and others “will be doing our best to inform the voters of what exactly this [amendment] means. If it were to pass, it would basically undo everything. So we will be fighting it tooth and nail, I can assure you.”

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