Editorial: A frightening tyranny over Florida women

In the novel “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a violent theocracy overthrows the U.S. government, and doctors who perform abortions are hanged. Young women are enslaved to bear children for influential older men.

Author Margaret Atwood’s imagination was inspired in part by the biblical tale of Hagar, the Egyptian handmaid whom Abraham’s wife gave to him to bear the child she didn’t think she could.

The author was thinking, as she later wrote, of “the heavy-handed theocracy of 17th century Puritan New England, with its marked bias against women.” She thought it would need “only a period of social chaos to reassert itself.”

Pure fiction? No. Again, life imitates art. Much of the nation — including Florida now — resembles a theocracy where women’s bodies belong to the state, not to themselves.

Abortion is fully or effectively forbidden in 19 states, including all of the South except North Carolina and Virginia, the closest recourses for Florida women after six weeks of pregnancy. Many women don’t know they are pregnant that fast, and likely may not even be pregnant, since the law counts “pregnancy” from the first day of the last missed menstrual period.

That will burden thousands of women, only some of whom will be able to obtain abortion pills online. Statistics illuminate the hardship: There were some 84,000 legal abortions in Florida last year, according to Planned Parenthood. The pills are generally considered safe only during the first 10 weeks. Their use without medical supervision is technically illegal in Florida, and there’s no doubt that the theocrats aspire to a nationwide ban on sending them through the mail.

Who’s responsible? The list

The greatest immediate danger is denial of emergency care to women with pregnancy complications. Physicians will necessarily think twice about what care to provide, even if delaying it might have lifelong consequences.

Many are to blame for Florida’s theocracy, starting with former President Donald Trump, who boasts of appointing the Supreme Court justices who repealed Roe v. Wade.

There are the six justices who did it; the Florida legislators who took advantage of what they did; Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose state Supreme Court appointments were as maliciously purposeful as Trump’s; the six Florida justices who signed an intellectually corrupt opinion excluding abortion from the protection of Florida’s constitutional right of privacy; and Attorney General Ashley Moody, who maintains that the privacy right applies only to the disclosure of information, not to police-state control of personal conduct.

The opportunities for so many people to do so much harm owe to fundamental fault lines in the constitutional order, and the triumph of “state’s rights” in the defeat of democracy.

Connecting the dots

The Republican Party has lost the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections, but its appointees hold six of the nine Supreme Court seats and are the ones who reversed Roe. Over a longer time, that Republican court has also given free rein to political gerrymandering and the corruption of unlimited campaign contributions (as in the Citizens United case), which enabled the election of most of the anti-abortion legislatures.

Between the gerrymandering and the campaign money, Florida’s Legislature is a picture of democracy in collapse.

When the Legislature passed the six-week abortion ban last year as Senate Bill 300, five of the 26 Republican senators who voted for it had been elected without opposition. They included Sen. Erin Grall of Vero Beach, the principal sponsor. Six more had no Democratic opposition.

In the House, 18 of the 70 “yes” voters were elected without opposition and 18 more won without Democratic opponents on the November ballot. That is 36 votes, more than half of the majority, cast by people who had not been fully challenged by the electoral process or chosen by voters.

Rep. Jennifer Canady of Lakeland, a House co-sponsor of the anti-abortion bill, who’s in line to become a future speaker, was one of those whom the Democrats didn’t challenge in 2022.

Her husband is Charles Canady, one of the justices who heard the critical abortion case and voted to nullify Florida’s constitutional right of privacy. Canady should have recused himself. Instead, he followed the odious example of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who continues to decide cases spawned by the 2020 election despite his wife’s active advocacy for Trump and parroting of his lies about that election.

Stacking the courts, legally

The Florida Constitution is flawed in failing to prevent governors from stacking the courts to suit their ideologies. It was supposed to, but no one thought to prevent governors from rigging the judicial nominating commissions, which the 2001 Legislature authorized.

On the federal level, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito haven’t given up on writing privacy out of the Constitution altogether. They want also to repeal the 1965 decision Griswold v. Connecticut, which forbade interfering with marital privacy by banning contraception. They want to repeal Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 decision that legalized same-sex marriage. Curiously, Thomas says nothing about Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 decision that eliminated bans on interracial marriages like his own.

Like Roe, Griswold and Obergefell depended upon the Constitution protecting the people of the United States from government intrusion into their private lives.

But now, many millions of women in the U.S., and in Florida particularly, are the handmaidens of theocrats who are doing just that.

Thomas Paine wrote, “tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.” But in Florida today, the tyrants are winning.

The Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board includes Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson, Opinion Editor Krys Fluker and Viewpoints Editor Jay Reddick. The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writer Martin Dyckman and Anderson. Send letters to insight@orlandosentinel.com.