ORLANDO, Fla. – Lauren Brenzel admits she was nervous Tuesday night when the polls closed in Ohio. Voters in the Buckeye state decided on Tuesday whether to protect abortion in a constitutional amendment, and the outcome of the vote was widely considered a bellwether for 2024.
But Brenzel, the director for the campaign trying to get abortion on the 2024 ballot in Florida, says that anxiety went away as the results came in.
“It was immediately apparent that Ohioans, like in every other state where abortion has been on the ballot since the Dobbs decision, were coming out in force to send a message they don’t want government interfering with their personal medical decisions,” Brenzel said.
Ohioans approved the abortion ballot measure with 56% of the vote, becoming the seventh state where voters backed access to abortion since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year.
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Brenzel’s group, Floridians Protecting Freedom, is using the Ohio win to rev up supporters for a big final push to collect petitions and get the issue on the 2024 ballot.
The amendment, if approved by voters, would block state law from prohibiting abortions before viability, which is generally considered to be around 24 weeks, or when necessary to protect a patient’s health.
Currently, Florida has a law in effect banning abortions after 15 weeks. However, the Florida Supreme Court is currently deciding whether that law violates Florida’s Constitution regarding a right to privacy. Should the court’s ruling favor the amendment, that would trigger an even stricter abortion ban to go into effect — a six-week abortion ban, which was passed earlier this year.
To get on the ballot, the group needs to collect 891,523 petition signatures from Florida voters. Right now they have 491,892 petitions signed that have been verified by the state, according to the Florida Division of Elections.
Brenzel won’t say how many petitions in total the group has collected, but they are trying to wrap up collections by Dec. 31.
“We’re collecting every day and there is as much as a 60-day lag time between collection and verification but we are confident we’ll collect the required number of petitions,” Brenzel said.
Petition collection is not the only hurdle the campaign has to get past. It also must get its ballot language approved by the Florida Supreme Court. The state requires that ballot language must include a single issue, and can’t be misleading.
Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody is asking the court to reject the abortion initiative, claiming the ballot summary lays “ticking time bombs” that will allow abortion advocates to try to broaden the amendment’s meaning in the future.
Moody argued that abortion rights proponents and opponents have differing interpretations as to what viability means. Those differences along with the failure to define “health” and “health-care provider,” she said, are enough to deceive voters and potentially open a box of legal questions in the future.
She said while prior court decisions have used viability as a term meaning whether the fetus can survive outside the womb, “others will understand ‘viability’ in the more traditional clinical sense — as referring to a pregnancy that, but for an abortion or other misfortune, will result in the child’s live birth.”
“We anticipated a challenge like this and worked with the best legal experts around to craft language that was clear and met the requirements to be put on the 2024 ballot,” Brenzel said.
News 6 political analyst Jim Clark guessed that Moody could be challenging the petition to ultimately avoid having the measure placed on the ballot.
“When the court rules, if they rule in her favor, it’ll be too late for the supporters of either the abortion or the marijuana bills to re-get the signatures, refile and get on the ballot,” he said.
If the amendment makes the November 2024 ballot, it will need approval from 60% of Florida voters to pass.
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