Florida legislative leaders to discuss further restrictions on abortions

The average person may not have been able to articulate exactly what Roe's framework was in explicit terms, but they understood the import of it. Just like now they understand the impact of getting rid of Roe. We're not talking about the difference between 22 and 24 weeks here.

It's likely going to happen. But it shouldn't have to happen when Floridians already voted to protect the right multiple times. We don't need another ballot initiative to confirm that we have a right to post our political opinions on the internet or a right to own ammunition here in Florida. Those rights are guaranteed by our state constitution, just like the right to access an abortion prior to viability.

I'll point out again that even if you want to debate what "right to privacy" means (and I think there's little merit to the argument that people didn't understand the "right to privacy" protected abortion access in 1980), the actual text of the amendment is quite clear: "Every natural person has the right to be let alone and free from governmental intrusion into the person's private life[.]"

What's interesting is how closely that language tracks this passage from Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438, 453 (1972):
"If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child."

But our right is actually broader because it doesn't use the word "unwarranted." Eisenstadt was a precursor to Roe.

 

Part of what makes me think it’s not an unreasonable compromise is that 12 weeks with exceptions is fairly directly in-line with the framework for abortion legality in most of Western Europe (many of the places that the left holds out as being models of how we should be governed).

And those European countries are regularly described (including by reproductive rights groups) as having broadly available legal abortion.

I struggle to understand how 12 weeks with exceptions provides “broad access to legal abortions” in Germany, Austria, Italy, Belgium, Denmark, Greece, Norway, Switzerland, and many smaller European countries, but is simultaneously treated as being the effective equivalent of a total ban and analogized to Handmaid’s Tale in the United States.

(Nearly all of Western Europe is somewhere between 10 and 14 weeks with specified exceptions. The outliers are a few of the very small nations that have total bans on one side, and the UK and the Netherlands at 24 weeks and Sweden at 18 weeks on the other.)

 

Should we look to Western Europe for our gun rights too?

 

And healthcare? Paid family leave? Universal preschool?

In addition, in Western Europe there are lots of exceptions to the 12 week mark,

 

Roe may not have been a good decision but as legislation it was just about perfect. It walked the tight rope just about as well as you could. No restrictions for the first trimester. Some restrictions for the second trimester. Third trimester almost a complete ban.

 

Other immediate priorities - drag queen story hour (they want to inspire more CSprings incidents), and ESG (voluntary corporate Environmental Social and Governance goals). Still think I'm too old to move until I retire, but man I feel out of place in this state

 

So many interesting angles


JERUSALEM — In a country with one of the world’s most liberal abortion policies, groups funded by conservative American evangelicals are targeting women with a message familiar in the United States but novel to most Israelis: Abortion is “murder.”

The idea resonated with Shir Palla Shitrit, 21, when she first contacted the “pregnancy crisis center” run by Be’ad Chaim — Hebrew for “pro-life.” In an office decorated with fetus diagrams, framed biblical passages and a ceramic sculpture of a breastfeeding mother, counselors offered her a year’s worth of material support and a place in a growing grassroots community.


Israel legalized abortion in 1977, four years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. Israeli Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz further eased access to abortion this year, saying the overturning of Roe had set back women’s rights “by a hundred years.”

But “pregnancy crisis centers” backed by conservative American evangelicals are becoming more prominent here, aiming to change the conversation around abortion and lay the groundwork for a political movement. Be’ad Chaim, a multimillion-dollar operation that has rapidly expanded in recent years, supplies women with carefully selected, or entirely distorted, facts to make the case against abortion. Pamphlets in Hebrew, English, Russian and Arabic show babies being stabbed in the heart or radiated to death, writhing in pain.

Conservative US evangelicals open anti-abortion front — in Israel
Conservative US evangelicals open anti-abortion front — in Israel - Tampa Bay Times

For more great content like this subscribe to the Tampa Bay Times app here:

 

Except that they don’t have a culture in Europe of using violence and terrorism to enforce your worldview on your fellow citizens like we do here. If you have a right, you can actually exercise it, without financial limit or physical threat.

Can’t simply adopt a legal regime and assume it will be applied similarly without a difference in culture. We have a very violent culture and the normalization of political violence

 

More obsession with drag shows resulting in power loss to thousands (thread)

 

First of all 15 weeks would be better than 12, it gives a little more time, and most European countries aren’t as early as 12 weeks.

Also, if we are going to replicate European abortion laws, let’s
Do it in full. After the initial period of fully legal abortion there are pretty liberal exceptions, much more so than Republican proposals in various states.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/22/europe-abortion-laws-vs-usa/

“Apart from the very few European nations that retain highly restrictive laws on abortion — Andorra, Lichtenstein, Malta, Monaco and Poland — no other European country “bans” abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Instead, almost all European countries allow abortion throughout pregnancy on a range of grounds, including where there are risks to a patient’s physical or mental health, and in situations involving severe or fatal fetal impairment.

For example, laws in Denmark and Norway allow abortion for social, economic or family reasons until fetal viability (the definition of which is not specified). German law allows abortion on grounds of serious risk to health throughout pregnancy, explicitly noting that this covers both physical and mental health.

The fact is that most European countries are moving to expand access to abortion, not limit it. In the majority of countries, European lawmakers have moved steadily forward for decades on the issue of access to abortion. They have removed bans, increased abortion’s legality and taken steps to ensure laws and policies on abortion are guided by public health evidence and clinical best practices”

 

I found this in an article in Fox News on the Warnock Walker race. I think and hope this is accurate.

After the Democrats spent hundreds of millions campaigning on abortion this cycle, the issue was placed at the forefront several midterm campaigns, including in Georgia. When the poll asked respondents what limitations Georgia should place on abortion, 50% said it should be legal with some limitations, 37% think it should be legal in all cases and 13% believe abortion should be illegal in all circumstances.

 

Translation: 50% believe that killing babies should be allowed in some cases, 37% believe that killing babies should be legal in all cases, 13% believe that killing babies should be illegal in all cases.

 

. There are already Florida Supreme Court cases applying the Roe Framework to the right to privacy. And, courts also construe codified rights with reference to the case law in existence at the time. The rule of interpretation is that the codifiers passed those rights with reference to the judicial interpretations and then didn’t change them with awareness of those same interpretations. To say that no voters understood that they voted for the Roe framework would be false. And. It doesn’t matter. It would take a leap of intellectual dishonesty to conclude that the Florida right to privacy does not embody the Roe framework. Unlike SCOTUS, the Florida Supreme Court is not free to read a right to privacy out of the Florida constitution because it it express, not a penumbral right was was expressed in Roe. And the cases in existence when the amendment was passed define that right. And, if history is examined— including the promotion of the amendment— it was passed to address the precise situation where Roe might be overruled.

 

What happens if the judicial interpretations are deemed to be poor interpretations even at the time in which they were made?

For example, Brown v. Board of Education, Plessy v. Ferguson.

 

In this instance, it would be an act of intellectual dishonesty and judicial activism to interpret the Florida right to privacy differently than Roe. Because the constitutional provision was passed with Roe in mind. its meaning is grounded in legal history-- the very analysis applied by the Supreme Court in Hobbs.

There is no way that the interpretations of the Florida right to privacy were wrong.

 

What is an act of intellectual honesty is suggesting that the meaning of "right to privacy" was conclusively decided among laypeople, lawyers, politicians, and/or judges with Roe. Everyone had to obey Roe when it was good law, but it was always a controversial decision, and it is no longer good law, and like it or not, it is absolutely fair to say that it was an atrocious decision even for its time.

 

Roe may not be good federal constitutional law, but it was codified as a Florida constitutional principle. That is not even debatable if you investigate the history of the Florida Right to Privacy.

You might find the discussion here interesting, especially Justice Anstead's comments.


Ex-chief justice: Florida’s broad constitutional right to privacy should block DeSantis’s abortion ban

Justice Anstead said:

Former Justice Anstead suggested there’s an indelible throughline from Roe to the TW decision in 1989. His one caveat is that “our right to privacy was much broader and more explicit.”

Within a decade of Florida voters approving Section 23 in 1980, the state high court ruled that “the right to be let alone” protects abortion. The TW decision held that Section 23 invalidated a 1988 law requiring minors to obtain parental consent for abortion.

The TW ruling is still the determining factor in reviewing Florida abortion regulations, according to Anstead. He served on the court from 1994 to 2009

He referred to this language in Justice Leander Shaw’s TW decision: “Florida’s privacy provision is clearly implicated in a woman’s decision of whether or not to continue her pregnancy. We can conceive of few more personal or private decisions concerning one’s body that one can make in the course of a lifetime.”
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Here are materials so you can understand rules of construction of a law.

I caution you to not latch onto one rule.

Commonly Applied Rules of Statutory Construction | Colorado General Assembly

chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.law.uh.edu/faculty/adjunct/dstevenson/2018Spring/CANONS OF CONSTRUCTION.pdf

chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://app.leg.wa.gov/committeeschedules/Home/Document/41619

 

And yet, they have the power to do exactly that in the abortion context. 4 of the 7 are DeSantis appointees. I fully expect them to come to the political outcome they want, not the one that is correct under the law. They are Republican politicians, and they have the power to choose the outcome.

 

Based on your premise I reject (and I get it, we don't have to agree on everything), if SCOTUS agrees with you, you were right, if they agree with me, they're "activist judges," as you expected.

There is no outcome where you can possibly be proven wrong. You're entitled to an opinion I just wanted to highlight that you pretty much covered all of your bases with that post so you're proven right no matter what.

 

Well, they could definitely prove me wrong by demonstrating that they're not political hacks who will choose the outcome they prefer. But no, you're not going to convince me that voters in 1980 were too stupid to understand what they were approving.