More than 850 Florida doctors are voicing their support for a ballot initiative to expand abortion rights.
They teamed up with Floridians Protecting Freedom, the group backing Amendment 4, to sign a letter urging Floridians to vote “yes” for the measure in the election.
The announcement comes as Gov. Ron DeSantis has been hosting press events with other physicians who oppose the proposed constitutional amendment.
Doctors are identified in the letter by their first name initial and first three letters of their last name, along with their specialty and city of practice. Four of them shared their full names and spoke about why they're endorsing Amendment 4 on a Tuesday press call.
The measure would allow abortions until fetal viability, which is usually around 24 weeks of pregnancy, or after that to protect a patient’s health if their health care provider deems it necessary.
It would undo Florida’s current six-week abortion ban, which includes exceptions for rape and incest survivors up to 15 weeks, fatal fetal anomalies for the first two trimesters and to protect the life of the mother at any stage of pregnancy.
Doctors like Chelsea Daniels, a family physician in Miami, shared stories of how those exceptions are failing some patients.
One of Daniels’ patients had recently immigrated to the U.S. and was raped, she said. In order to qualify for the 15-week exception, survivors must provide some sort of documentation to verify the assault, such as a police report or hospital record.
“I called to make the report on her behalf but the police told us that the necessary documentation could take months and this is time that she is not granted under Florida’s abortion ban,” said Daniels. “So ultimately she was unable to prove that she had been raped in order to obtain an abortion in Florida.”
Daniels did not say how she treated the woman. Another patient came to Daniels with a nonviable pregnancy, she said.
“By the time she came to my clinic, she brought four ultrasounds with her from four different doctors showing the same thing: that she was technically eight weeks pregnant but the pregnancy was not growing. She needed an abortion because each passing day put her at increased risk for infection and bleeding.”
Again Daniels did describe the care she provided, but said she understood why the other doctors “turned her away.”
“They were afraid,” she said. “The exception criteria are so narrow that they can’t possibly address every single case, so if a doctor gets audited and the state challenges their judgement, they could be fined, lose their license and sent to jail.”
What opponents are saying
Gov. DeSantis argues the ban’s exceptions are clear. The state Agency for Health Care Administration lists a handful of conditions that qualify as exceptions to protect the life of the mother and has threatened doctors with medical malpractice penalties if they fail to provide life-saving care to patients.
An OB-GYN in Miami who opposes Amendment 4, Christina Peña, echoed the governor’s sentiments at the press conference he hosted on Monday in Coral Gables.
“The cases I’ve been hearing in the media of patients who supposedly lost their lives because of not having access to abortion were due to the medical negligence of the doctors involved. Don’t let them lie to you and tell you otherwise,” she said.
But doctors speaking out against the six-week ban say a patient shouldn’t have to wait until they’re in a life-threatening situation to get the care they need.
Even for some patients who are able to get abortion care under the exceptions, delays and hesitancy from their medical providers can cause unnecessary trauma and health risks, said Kathleen Dumitru, an emergency medicine physician in Jacksonville.
She described a patient she saw whose water had broken too early for the fetus to survive. A doctor treated her, Dumitru said, but only after consulting with legal and ethics teams first.
“I’m grateful that she was able to receive care, but she shouldn’t have had to wait and risk infection or been made to feel like she or her doctors were doing something wrong,” she said.
Legal challenges continues
Amendment 4 needs 60% of the vote to pass. Early voting is already underway as legal battles over the measure continue.
Four women are suing to invalidate the proposal, relying on a recent state report that accuses some of the workers who collected petition signatures to get the measure on the ballot of fraud. It also accuses Floridians Protecting Freedom of illegally paying works to collect signatures.
In another lawsuit, Floridians Protecting Freedom argues the state was censoring political speech by threatening TV stations for broadcasting an ad in support of Amendment 4.
Last week a judge issued a temporary restraining order that blocked the state from making any more legal threats, and on Monday, the former Department of Health top lawyer John Wilson said lawyers for DeSantis wrote the threatening letter under his name and told him to mail it to TV stations.
The DeSantis administration has been opposing Amendment 4 for months, with the governor becoming more active this week following back-to-back hurricanes.
“When you're dealing with constitutional amendments your default should always be no,” DeSantis said at the event in Coral Gables. “You can always alter normal policies and legislation. Once it's in the constitution, that's forever. You really have zero chance of ever changing it.”
Though he and other opponents argue the proposal to expand abortion rights is "radical," legal experts say the amendment language is similar to abortion laws before Roe v. Wade was overturned.
With a Republican supermajority in the state legislature that includes some lawmakers who support tougher restrictions on abortion, Amendment 4 supporters argue this is “the only way” to overturn the six-week ban.
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