Government

Florida Tries To Ban Abortion Referendum Ads Under Public Health Law That Regulates Slaughterhouses And Septic Tanks

Ron DeSantis is a free speech warrior!

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Is the Twitter comments section running Florida’s legal department these days? Has state AG Ashley Moody simply wandered off in shame after one too many spankings at the hands of the federal judiciary? What even is this shit?

Screenshot of C&D letter from Florida Health Dept threatening TV stations with criminal prosecution if they don't pull an ad opposing the abortion referendum.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s administration has tried multiple stratagems to sour the public on Amendment 4, a ballot referendum which would enshrine the right to an abortion in the state’s constitution. Now Health Department General Counsel John Wilson is threatening criminal penalties for a Gainesville television station if it doesn’t pull an ad supporting the state’s abortion referendum off the air.

The spot features a Florida woman named Caroline who was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer when she was 20 weeks pregnant.

“The doctors knew if I did not end my pregnancy, I would lose my baby, I would lose my life, and my daughter would lose her mom. Florida has now banned abortion even in cases like mine,” she said.

According to Florida health officials, this spot is a “sanitary nuisance” under the Florida Clean Air Act, which imposes on the DOH the duty to order the remediation of sanitary nuisances such as “air pollutants, gases, and noisome odors,” “improperly built or maintained septic tanks, water closets, or privies,” “any condition capable of breeding flies, mosquitoes, or other arthropods,” or “the keeping, maintaining, propagation, existence, or permission of anything, by an individual, municipality, organization, or corporation, by which the health or life of an individual, or the health or lives of individuals, may be threatened or impaired, or by which or through which, directly or indirectly, disease may be caused.”

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Apparently the video of this woman describing her own experiences falls into that last category.

Women faced with pregnancy complications posing a serious risk of death or substantial and irreversible physical impairment may and should seek medical treatment in Florida. However, if they are led to believe that such treatment is unavailable under Florida law, such women could foreseeably travel out of state to seek emergency medical care, seek emergency medical care from unlicensed providers in Florida, or not seek emergency medical care at all. Such actions would threaten or impair the health and lives of these women.

BREAKING: Crisis pregnancy centers are illegal now.

The Elias Law Group, which represents Floridians Protecting Freedom, the group which placed the ad, responded with its own letter to the station, published by Florida Politics, calling the DOH’s threat “a textbook example of government coercion that violates the First Amendment” and “a flagrant abuse of power.”

The letter also notes that nothing in the ad was false. Florida’s six-week ban does have an exception to preserve the mother’s life, but with a terminal diagnosis, Caroline would not have qualified.

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“Practically, that means that an abortion would not have saved her life, only extended it,” FPF’s lawyers wrote. “Florida law would not allow an abortion in this instance because the abortion would not have ‘save[d] the pregnant woman’s life,’ only extended her life.”

Meanwhile, DeSantis is using taxpayer funds to run ads falsely claiming that the amendment, which enshrines the right to a pre-viability abortion, would deregulate abortion care and override parental consent laws.

“What’s going to happen is that will create a lot of bootleg abortion clinics around the state,” he said last month. Of course, he also said that Florida is a shining beacon of free speech, so … take that one with a giant grain of salt.

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.

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