Editorial: Fla. attorney general moves to silence voters once again

Attorney General Ashley Moody won’t be satisfied with simply banning abortion in Florida, at which she appears close to success. She also intends to prevent voters from doing anything about it.

Moody has notified the Florida Supreme Court that she will ask it to rule against placing a constitutional initiative guaranteeing abortion rights on the November 2024 ballot.

The drive has collected signatures from more than 400,000 voters toward a required goal of nearly 900,000. Sponsors and supporters have spent more than $9.7 million in anticipation of Florida Supreme Court rulings that would effectively abolish abortion in Florida.

The initiative would change the constitution to say that “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 providers.” It would not affect an existing provision dealing with parental notification.

A focus on ‘viability’

Moody telegraphed her strategy in an opinion essay to Florida newspapers, arguing that the language of the ballot summary and the amendment is ambiguous and would mislead voters.

“As any mother knows, ‘viability’ has two meanings when it comes to pregnancy,” Moody wrote.

Some women, according to Moody, relate viability to the risk of miscarriage, while others take it to mean when a fetus can survive outside the womb.

She wrote that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which supports abortion rights, “notes the two medical definitions.”

What’s misleading is Moody’s misrepresentation of where the American College actually stands on that definition. There is nothing misleading about the term viability so long as doctors are defining it — and they are the only ones who should.

The full definition

This is precisely how doctors define it: “Viability is the capacity of the fetus to survive outside the mother’s uterus. Whether or not this capacity exists is a medical determination, may vary with each pregnancy, and is a matter for the judgment of the responsible attending physician.” (Emphasis added).

Moody did not quote that.

Most commonly, viability is calculated at 23 or 24 weeks of gestation. It is not, and never should be, a matter for meddling or ambitious politicians like Moody.

Moody has consistently been on the wrong side of a woman’s right to her own body. In a pending case being watched nationally, she has urged the court to repeal its historic 1989 decision that Florida’s constitutional right of privacy protects abortion rights.

Were the court to do that, it would effectively limit privacy protection to the release of public records — a faint shred of how the court defined it in 1989.

The court, then and now

“Florida’s privacy provision is clearly implicated in a woman’s decision of whether or not to continue her pregnancy,” Justice Leander Shaw wrote at the time. “We can conceive of few more personal or private decisions concerning one’s body that one can make in the course of a lifetime.”

Restricting the provision, as Moody and the Legislature want the court to do, would expose almost any personal conduct to political control, from end-of-life decisions to the availability of contraception. Parental rights could, and likely would, be subject to unlimited interference by the state.

The pending case involves the constitutionality of Florida’s current ban on abortions past 15 weeks, but a law the Legislature passed this spring automatically caps the procedure at six weeks, a time when many women don’t know they are pregnant, if the court upholds the 15-week ban.

In what appears to be a clear breach of judicial ethics, Justice Charles Canady has been participating in the case despite the interest of his wife, state Rep. Jennifer Canady, R-Lakeland, as a co-sponsor of the six-week abortion ban, which passed as SB 300.

Moody and the Legislature are contemptuous of how the voters spoke nine years ago on a ballot proposal by lawmakers that would have expressly overruled the 1989 precedent. It would have narrowed privacy rights to those determined by the U.S. Supreme Court under the federal constitution. The vote was 4.3 million against and 3.5 million in favor. Had it passed, there would be no privacy rights in Florida because of the high court’s subsequent decision repealing Roe v. Wade.

Hostility toward voters

Moody’s quibbling over “viability” is in line with her hostility to giving voters a voice on other controversial citizen-sponsored amendments. She opposes those dealing with marijuana. Even after Parkland, she sided with the gun lobby in persuading the court to not allow a statewide vote on banning assault weapons.

The attorney general is required to petition the court to rule on proposed initiatives when they hit a threshold of verified signatures. The abortion question qualified with 222,881. Moody is not required to oppose them. It is difficult to conceive of any dealing with abortion rights, marijuana legalization or guns to which she would not manufacture an objection.

The job of Florida attorney general has long been called “the people’s lawyer.” Moody is not.

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The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writer Martin Dyckman and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.

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