ORLANDO, Fla. – Before we begin, note these three key points about Florida’s Amendment 4, which is on the ballot for the November 5, 2024, election.
- A YES vote for the Amendment means you would like Florida to return to a 24-week timeline for abortions (known as viability), you want the right to an abortion enshrined in the state’s constitution, and you don’t want state government to mandate or restrict the right for a woman to have an abortion.
- A NO vote means you want to keep Florida’s current abortion timeline of six weeks, you don’t want the state’s constitution to be amended to guarantee women in the state of Florida the right to have an abortion, and you’re OK with the government having the ability to reduce that timeline further or ban abortions completely in the state.
One other important aspect about voting on an amendment to the state constitution: It takes a 60% voter approval to have an amendment pass rather than a 50%+1 simple majority.
[RESULTS 2024: Complete Coverage | Voter Guide for the Nov. 5 election | Here are the 6 amendments that will be on the Florida ballot in November]
With that out of the way, here we go:
Ten.
Ten states have already voted on it, and 10 more, including Florida, will vote on it on Nov. 5.
The “it” is abortion rights and Florida is just one of ten states with ballot measures to shape the future of how abortions will be mandated going forward.
Amendment 4 is just one paragraph (the 49-word ballot summary actually has more words than the 39-word Amendment). Although the amendment’s brevity has critics up in arms, calling it “vague” and “dangerous,” the core message is very clear: undo Florida’s restrictive abortion timeline and promise that the right to an abortion will be guaranteed by the state’s constitution.
For years, abortions in Florida kept in step with the framework adopted after the Roe v. Wade decision was handed down by the Supreme Court on January 22, 1973. The court ruled that the Constitution protected a woman’s right to privacy, including the right to have an abortion.
But even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022, right-leaning (red) states had been looking toward the possibility of reversing mandates of the federal case that had set the standards for abortion in the U.S. for almost 50 years.
For the moment, let’s put aside where we are today and first look at how we got here.
Although Roe v. Wade established a constitutional right to abortion across the country, Florida’s abortion story began a few months before the landmark Supreme Court decision.
On February 14, 1972, Florida’s Supreme Court ruled that the state’s 103-year-old ban on abortions was unconstitutional. State rules prohibited abortions unless the mother’s life was in danger. It also categorized abortions as manslaughter. With the law thrown out, two months later, legislators created a new court-mandated abortion law permitting abortions (for any reason) up to 16 weeks. After 16 weeks, abortions would only be allowed if the mother’s life was in danger because of the pregnancy, if the pregnancy was caused by rape or incest, or if the child would be born with a serious mental or physical defect. The new law also put two more rules into play: if the mother was married, her husband needed to provide consent, and, only certain doctors at specific hospitals could perform the procedure.
Just over a year later, the Roe v. Wade decision was announced. In essence, it did not throw all of Florida’s abortion rules out the window, just some of them. For the next 16 years, the state fell in line with the rest of the country guided by the 1973 Supreme Court ruling.
On December 4, 1989, the state of Florida issued a landmark decision of its own on an abortion case, again with an emphasis on privacy. The case, In re T.W., centered around a 15-year-old pregnant girl from Lake County (T.W.) who petitioned for an abortion without parental consent. In its ruling, Florida’s Supreme Court established the state’s Constitutional right to privacy extended to a woman’s decision to terminate a pregnancy and ruled the state’s law mandating parental consent clashed with the state’s privacy provision. Key to the decision (Section 23) was that the right to privacy extended to “every natural person,” including minors. The ruling nullified Florida’s requirement of parental consent for abortions for minors.
About 14 years after the 1989 ruling, parental notification was put back on the books: On November 2, 2004, voters passed Amendment 1 which gave the state the power to draft laws once again requiring parental notification (not consent) before a minor receives an abortion.
For the next 18 years, Florida abortion law didn’t really change. The proverbial “beginning of the end” came not in the summer of 2022 (see the Dobbs V. Jackson decision below), but two months earlier in the spring with the passage of Florida’s House Bill 5.
With a Republican governor who had ambitions for a presidential run in 2024 and a Senate and House chamber both controlled by Republicans as well, Florida was poised to make a name for itself among conservatives nationwide. Abortion was a hot topic, especially with a newly, right-leaning U.S. Supreme Court. The Court had three recently appointed conservative justices put into place by former President Donald Trump.
On April 14, 2022, Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed HB 5, a new law that curtailed abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The bill, passed more than a month prior, was the state’s strictest push-back in the Roe era and would take effect on July 1, 2022.
The new Florida law signed by DeSantis however was sort of in limbo. While being almost immediately challenged in court, attention was also focused on the U.S. Supreme Court as both pro-life and pro-choice advocates awaited the court’s decision on a different state’s challenge to federal abortion guidelines. If the Court rejected that argument, Florida’s new law would likely face a similar fate. If, however, the Supreme Court upheld the new state’s guidelines, Florida’s new 15-week ban was probably going to end up in the clear.
On June 24, 2022, in a 6-3 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld an appeal that followed standards for abortions based on state rules, not federal rules. The court’s decision put three major changes in motion:
- The case, 19-1392 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, came before the court to answer a straightforward question: Could the state of Mississippi defy Roe v. Wade and instead dictate its own timeline for when a woman could have an abortion? The court’s 6-3 decision said yes, Mississippi could restrict abortions after a certain time. In this case, that period was 15 weeks (about 3½ months after a pregnancy started), the same as what DeSantis had signed into law.
- In giving the state of Mississippi the power to set its own standards for abortions, the ruling opened the floodgates that all states could now set their own rules on how to handle abortions. Roe v. Wade had set the boundaries that (generally) abortions shouldn’t be performed after 24 weeks (commonly known as viability, or the time when a fetus could viably exist outside of a mother’s womb). Abortions after 24 weeks were typically allowed only to save the mother’s life or in cases of severe fetal abnormalities.
- Lastly, in overturning Roe v. Wade, the court threw out the federal constitutional right that women had to terminate a pregnancy, writing “The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion.” That right to an abortion, previously guaranteed by the federal government, would now fall to individual states.
Though the April 2022 ban was still in litigation when the Dobbs decision was handed down, Florida Republicans were wasting no time in pushing restrictions even further. A new even more restrictive ban of six weeks sailed through the state’s 2023 spring legislative session and was signed into law by DeSantis on April 14, 2023. The law however had one interesting caveat: it would not go into effect until 30 days after the Florida’s Supreme Court issued a ruling on the 15-week ban.
On April 1, 2024, the Florida Supreme Court issued that ruling. In fact, the Court handed down two significant, yet distinct, decisions on the same day. The first (6-1) cemented that Florida’s 15-week abortion timeline (signed into law in April of 2022) was constitutional. As a result, the court also greenlit Florida’s more restrictive six-week ban that would now take effect on May 1, 2024.
The second ruling, however, is what put us where we are today.
Aside from approving the 15-week ban (triggering the six-week ban to take effect 30 days later), in a separate decision decided by a 4-3 vote, the Florida Supreme Court gave the go-ahead for a ballot measure to amend the state’s constitution.
The Amendment to Limit Government Interference with Abortion (more commonly known in the 2024 election cycle as Amendment 4), said Floridians could decide whether or not to enshrine abortion rights for its citizens in the state constitution. In taking this path, supporters of Amendment 4 bypassed the conservative Governor’s office, Senate, and House (which would have had the option along the way of vetoing a passed bill or letting the bill die in committee).
Bypassing elected state officials and going the route of a state constitutional amendment, however, comes with its own restrictions: proponents of the measure need to get signatures equal to 8% of the votes cast in the state’s previous presidential election (for this cycle that was almost 900k signatures).
Next, those signatures must come from at least half of the state’s 28 congressional districts.
Lastly, it takes a voter approval of 60% to have an amendment pass, rather than a 50%+1 simple majority.
So, what are the chances of a 60% pass? Polling has been close, and few other states with similar measures have come close or exceeded the 60% mark.
The 10 states with abortion initiatives on the ballot for Nov. 5 are Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New York, and South Dakota. Nebraska has two initiatives up for vote (one for and one against).
Prior to this election year, in 2022, voters in both Kansas and Kentucky rejected state amendments that would have restricted abortion rights. That same year, Vermont voters overwhelmingly (76.9% approval) voted to protect abortion rights through a state amendment. The following year, voters in California, Michigan, and Ohio did the same. Those 10 states have all sent messages to their governors, senators, and representatives that abortion rights are something they feel needs protection.
Finally, we’ve talked about the 10 states that have voted on state amendments and 10 that have upcoming votes. There are four more states to add to this list that made pre-emptive moves against abortion rights before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Those states are Tennessee (2014), Alabama (2018), Virginia (2018) and Louisiana (2020).
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