On Election Night, Floridians voted by a majority to overturn its six-week ban on abortion and restore reproductive rights. But it didn’t matter.
The Florida abortion measure, Amendment 4, which would have allowed abortion up to the point of fetal viability, lost anyway. The final tally was 57 percent yes to 43 percent no. The result effectively means that a minority of voters decided the state’s future on the issue, and gave the state the distinction of becoming the first to have an abortion ballot measure fail post-Dobbs.
Confusing, I know. You’d think that an obvious and decisive percentage split like that would be a clear message on what voters wanted. But because the Florida abortion measure was an amendment to the state constitution, it needed a 60 percent threshold of votes to pass. This statute requiring a higher majority passed in 2006, ironically with just under 58 percent of the vote. Another proposed amendment, which would have legalized marijuana, also won the popular majority on Tuesday night but failed because of the threshold.
The amendment’s failure means that the state’s Heartbeat Protection Act will stay the law of the land. The act prohibits abortion “once the unborn child has a detectable heartbeat,” or around six weeks gestation, and went into effect in April of this year. There is an exception, for rape and incest but only until 15 weeks gestation, and in a particularly cruel twist on the exception, women must show “documentation” of their assault to get one.
For activists, the loss was an infuriating but, they hope, temporary blow. Governor Ron DeSantis had campaigned hard against the measure, and declared victory soon after polls closed at 8:00 p.m. But the Yes on 4 Florida Campaign said in a statement that the majority split in the vote shows that Floridians actually do not want the ban his administration enacted.
“Tonight, Floridians made their voices heard loud and clear, demanding an end to the state’s restrictive 6-week abortion ban,” they said.
They called on the state’s lawmakers to make the will of the people heard.
“Without immediate action from the legislature, Floridians will remain under a 6-week ban—one that impacts countless women before they may even realize they’re pregnant,” they said.
The amendment’s disheartening loss though, resonated not only with Floridians, but nationally among women. As confusion turned to anger, many found an allegory for the way they feel the will of the minority on abortion rights is being imposed on all American women.
“The abortion rights measure in Florida ‘lost’ with 57% of the vote and 1.5 million more votes than the opposition,” said abortion rights reporter Jessica Valenti on X. “And for what it’s worth: Amendment 4 got a million more votes than Ron DeSantis did in 2022.”
In a cruel but somewhat unsurprising reality, the Florida abortion vote shook out not too far off from the current sentiment on abortion rights in the US as a whole. Currently, 63 percent of Americans believe abortion should be legal “in most and all cases,” with 36 percent saying it should be illegal in most or all cases.
It’s really not in question: the majority of Americans believe abortion should be legal. Yet, we lost our federally protected rights in 2022, with the fall of Roe. v Wade. Now, more than half of the states in the US have enacted legislation on reproductive rights that the Guttmacher Institute calls “restrictive,” ranging from nearly total bans on abortion to laws that make obtaining one cumbersome or difficult in one way or another.
In more than a dozen states, women cannot end a pregnancy after six weeks gestation, just two weeks after missing their period and before many women even realize they are expecting. And in many of these same states, it doesn’t matter if you are a child who is pregnant as a result of rape, or if you are having a miscarriage, bleeding heavily, but your baby still has a heartbeat, or you are an excited mother-to-be who finds out at your 20 week appointment that your baby will die.
In this way, the Florida result serves as an infuriatingly familiar allegory for the state of abortion rights in this country. A minority who does not believe in safe, legal abortions and reproductive rights for women is imposing their will on the majority who does.
And with the second Trump presidency looming, things certainly do not look like they are going to change any time soon.
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