Republican Attorney General Ashley Moody has come out against letting Florida voters decide whether to protect access to abortion in the state, arguing that proposed ballot language is ambiguous about what the citizen’s initiative would do.
Moody, a noted abortion opponent, said as much Monday in launching the standard Florida Supreme Court review of whether the language would mislead voters.
She didn’t reveal much about her reasoning in a note to the court, writing, “For reasons that will be set forth in the brief to be filed with the court at the appropriate time, I submit that the aforementioned initiative does not satisfy the legal requirements for ballot placement.”
But Moody offered more detail about her thinking in an opinion piece published last week on the Florida Voice website, arguing the word “viability” as used in the proposal is ambiguous. She accused the sponsors of trying to deceive people.
“While I personally would not vote for this initiative no matter what definition of ‘viability’ it was using, I know that to some voters, it is material to their vote – whether you are talking about an abortion in the first trimester or at the end of the second trimester,” Moody wrote.
In her note to the court, Moody noted that the proposed state constitutional amendment sponsor, Floridians Protecting Freedom, had collected one-quarter of the 891,589 signatures needed to qualify for a place on the ballot. At least 60% of the voters would have to approve for the amendment for it to take effect.
As of the latest update, the state Division of Elections had validated well more than that amount with 402,082 petition signatures.
The initiative launched after the U.S. Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade last summer. Anticipating that ruling, the Florida Legislature passed and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation barring most abortions after 15 weeks’ gestation. Earlier this year, they banned abortion after six weeks but that’s contingent on the Florida Supreme Court upholding the 15-week ban.
The justices are deliberating now about whether to do that, which would require them to overrule the court’s own 1989 precedent establishing a privacy right to abortion under the Florida Constitution. Members of the court seemed amendable to doing so during recent oral arguments. That would make the initiative the citizens’ last chance to protect abortion rights.
Accurate summary?
The initiative’s ballot summary reads:
“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. This amendment does not change the Legislature’s constitutional authority to require notification to a parent or guardian before a minor has an abortion.”
In her op-ed, Moody complained specifically that the word “viability” has two meanings.
“First, it means whether a pregnancy is expected to continue developing normally through delivery. Doctors can tell during the first trimester, usually around about 12 weeks, whether a pregnancy is viable and would have a much lower risk of miscarriage. For that reason, many women often wait to tell family and friends about their pregnancy until that time,” Moody wrote.
“Second, viability is sometimes used to mean whether a baby can survive outside of the uterus, which currently is around 21 to 25 weeks of pregnancy. The two time periods, depending on your definition of viability, are starkly different, and the procedures performed to abort a baby’s life at either time period are dissimilar,” she continued.
This article originally appeared in florida phoenix