The Supreme Court of Alabama Revisited a Proposed Amendment to Protect the Right to Abortion and Birthrights Under Pregnancies
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — The discussion of a proposed state constitutional amendment that would explicitly protect access to abortion took a turn for the better last month at the Florida Supreme Court.
“The chief justice seemed to really be trained on trying to understand what the effects of this ballot initiative would be on other areas of the law,” Driskell said.
The Chief Justice wanted to know how the amendment might affect the right to life of “all natural persons” in the Florida Constitution.
“I can’t say that the term natural person doesn’t include the unborn,” Muiz said during the hearing.
“Chief Justice Muiz is planning on sending an engraved invitation to make an argument to the Florida Supreme Court,” said a University of California-Davis law professor.
The measure specified that a child must be born in the womb to be considered an unborn child, but opponents were concerned it could cut off access to reproductive health care. Lauren Book raised concerns, that the measure could be used to bring a fetal personhood case to the Supreme Court.
It’s a topic that’s made headlines since the Alabama Supreme Court ruled in a recent wrongful death case that embryos are “extrauterine children.” The ruling that raised the questions about access to in-vitro fertilization in the state sent ripples throughout the country.
The Republican Party would like you to believe that there’s no real dispute within its ranks about in vitro fertilization. After the Alabama Supreme Court took the logic of fetal personhood laws seriously and issued a ruling that threw infertility care in Alabama into chaos, one party leader after another came forward to praise I.V.F.
The anti- abortion movement is working on a plan similar to that which has worked in the past, according to her. When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurring opinion, in which he pointed to states that had laws on the books against abortion access.
For decades, members of the anti-abortion rights movement have been working to put laws on the books across the country that extend rights to fetuses — like fetal homicide, wrongful death, and child support during pregnancy.
Ziegler said each new law passed creates a cumulative effect. When a state recognizes a fetus as a person in one area of law it will make it easier for lawyers to argue that the Constitution doesn’t give fetuses the same rights as people. If states like Alabama and Florida recognize fetuses as people in their laws and constitutions, she said, it helps set the dominos for an argument on the national level.
Several States have enacted restrictions that are against the law of the state. Those laws cannot be dismissed as political stunts or as outlier laws,” Kavanaugh wrote. The state laws represent the sincere and deeply held views of tens of millions of Americans.
A bill that would allow parents to recover damages for the loss of a baby was recently considered by the Florida Legislature. While the bill’s sponsors (who helped to pass Florida’s pending six-week abortion ban) said the wrongful death measure had nothing to do with abortion, advocates on both sides of the issue disagreed.
The founder of the group Florida Voice for the Unborn told the lawmakers that he would say the quiet part out loud. The wrongful death bill has reinforced his belief that unborn children should be treated as humans, according to his viewpoint.
“When you’re tiptoeing and you’re delving for personhood, you’re coming for it and it’s only a matter of time,” Book said. “I think for a long time people suggested that advocates [and] lawmakers who talked about personhood, coming after IVF, the abortion battle, that we were somehow hyperbolic or hysterical. Well, look where we are.”
A Democratic Senator’s Statement On The Importance of a State-Sensior Abortion Proposed by the U.S. Senate
In a statement, the Republican state senator said that she had worked diligently to respond to questions and concerns but noted that there was still work to be done. “It is important we get the policy right with an issue of this significance.”
“People across the country are talking about it,” Book said. “I think at the end of the day, Republicans realize this is a problem. This isn’t something that they should be doing.”
There will be a question on how the anti-abortion movement reacts to Republican efforts to sideline it. Already, Kari Lake, a candidate for Senate in Arizona, who once called abortion “the ultimate sin,” has come out against both a federal abortion ban and a near-total Arizona abortion ban that’s tied up in court.
On Wednesday, leading figures in the movement, including Lila Rose of Live Action, Marjorie Dannenfelser of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and Brent Leatherwood of the Southern Baptist Convention, signed a letter to Gov. Kay Ivey of Alabama urging her to veto the bill. Both logic and science agree that embryos must be accorded the same human rights as all other human beings at every stage of life.