There's good news and bad news out of Florida today. The bad news is that the state supreme court approved a ban on abortions beyond six weeks.¹ The good news is that the court also approved a ballot measure that would legalize abortion before fetal viability, which is usually around 24 weeks.
The ballot measure will be a close call. It needs 60% to pass, and recent surveys suggest that abortion support is just a little higher than that in Florida.
There's also the Florida legislature to consider. You may recall that the good people of Florida passed a measure in 2018 to give released felons the right to vote, but the legislature stepped in to gut the measure by requiring felons to pay off a big list of fees and other costs before they could vote. I imagine they could come up with some bright ideas to do the same for abortion. Like, I dunno, abortion is legal before viability, but "viability" means "viability in the womb" since the text of the ballot measure doesn't actually say inside or outside.
We'll see. An interesting political aside is how much this ballot measure is likely to change turnout in Florida. Trump won in 2020 by about 3%, but if abortion gets a whole bunch of liberals to the polls it might become a pretty close race.
¹On a technical note, a 6-week ban is effectively a full ban. Most women only barely know they're pregnant by six weeks, so a 6-week ban would prevent practically all abortions.
On a technical note, the "6 weeks" is a silly fig leaf for squishy "moderates" who think women are getting maybe a little too uppity but mostly just don't want to hear about that icky sex and fluids and stuff and want it all to go away.
95% of people know perfectly well what they want: to reduce women to powerless baby factories, because something something Jesus something, and also Hillary, and the Good Old Days when America was great.
and once these kids are born don't hold your breath waiting for red states to feed, clothe, or educate them
all life is sacred, but they'd have kids selling chiclets at the on-ramp if they thought it would keep their taxes low
Well, SOME life is sacred. The Unborn are Pure, of course, but after their Occasion of Sin, then a lot of them are just scruffy rug-rats. Breeding, you know. Can't be wasting My Hard-Earned Tax Dollars™ on the wrong sort, if you know what I mean.
Honest question: How can people tell how many weeks pregnant someone else is? Is there some test? When my wife was pregnant, we did not know exactly when she got pregnant at least any closer than maybe a couple weeks.
I mean, if I was a woman and wanted an abortion after say 9 weeks, I would just go in and lie. Is there any way that someone can reliably tell a 9-week pregnancy from a 6-week pregnancy?
The timing is usually from LMP -- last menstrual period -- generally about two weeks before actual fertilization.
There is a definite difference between 6 weeks and 9 weeks on an ultrasound, and given the penalties for missing the date I suspect they'll become mandatory.
Right but (1) do women always remember exactly when their LMP was, and even if they do, (2) what stops them from making up a date that allows them to have an abortion in, say, week 7? Anything self-reported is going to have a lot of fuzziness in its accuracy, as guys are well aware from studies that report average penis sizes.
I think it's not so much that anti-abortionists want to "reduce women to powerless baby factories", though there is some of that. I suspect the dominant aim is to reduce women to asexuality except when they're actively seeking to become mothers. Sexually active, assertive "promiscuous" women scare the conservative types.
This instantly put Florida in play for the presidential election and for Rick Scott's senate seat.
Good catch! Let's hope the Democratic Party steps up ... as they have been doing so far.
Now, if Biden could just quit facilitating the Gaza genocide - every time I get set to send him a nice contribution, he sends more military hardware to Israel, and I choke.
Israel is building up an even greater debt of blood in the middle east than it already has, and if they are really so stupid, they think killing lots of civilians, children, and babies is going to "make them safe", they're morons and morally depraved.
It's their 9/11. They're going to massively overreact, just like we did when we used drones to kill children playing soccer or people attending weddings in Afghanistan and Iraq. And they aren't going to listen to anybody who advises more peaceful or thoughtful strategies to deal with Hamas, just like how we didn't listen to anybody who told us that Al Qaeda or ISIS wasn't in Iraq and had already fled Afghanistan. And Hamas will simply relocate to some other Arabic country nearby and continue to wreak havoc wherever they can. And perhaps a generation or two from now, Israelis will finally realize their error and want to sweep it all under the rug, like how most Americans just want to forget Iraq or Afghanistan ever happened.
Only difference is they're going to have the destroyed and bitter families of those they kill living right next door to them, so I expect their next 2+ decades to have a lot more follow-up domestic terrorism than we had.
"It's their 9/11."
Except it would be as if 42,000 Americans were murdered on 9/11, not 3,000.
Thank you for pointing out that Israel isn't really acting any worse than the US did after 9/11. They're both students of the George W. Bush School of International Relations.
Who's this 'we' you speak of, Kemosabe? Eveyone - everyone - I knew held the position that there was insufficient evidence to hold Iraq accountable.
I'm guessing you're 'we' is/was the usual clown car of incompetents, the so-called Very Serious People.
Just had to work Gaza and the so-called "genocide" in. Dude, give it a rest sometimes please.
Sorry. And the genocide isn't "so-called." I know; traditionally, we need to wait until everybody is dead before deciding whether or not it really was "genocide". But that just seems a little pointless.
I would not hold my breath on FL Democrats. They have not shown out very well this year
https://www.governing.com/politics/florida-democrats-self-inflicted-wound
East coast Democrats generally suck. They don’t do strategy. They don’t do turnout drives. They don’t do oppo research. They don’t rule as Democrats when actually in power. They don’t see Republicans as their mortal enemies.
The Florida SC also allowed a recreational cannabis initiative to be on the November ballot today as well. Combined with the abortion amendment, the Democrats better be able to ride some coattails.
I counted the number of states in play for the Democrats in the 2024 presidential election. I get 50. Then I counted the number of safe Republican senate seats. I get zero. Time will tell.
Ironies of life: a 60% requirement will motivate voters more than a 50% requirement. Now one will say it will also motivate pro-lifers but until Dobbs, they have always being highly motivated.
Just for clarification, you usually don’t notice a missed period or get a positive pregnancy test until the 4-week mark, since the first two weeks are spent not pregnant and it takes another ten days or more after ovulation/conception to actually confirm anything. At best. So while some women may not know they’re pregnant until six weeks, the best-case scenario still only allows two weeks for decisions, funding, and logistics, which is… not enough.
Yeah, that got my attention too.
Maybe the Florida SC is sick of Giggle Boots too?
I don't think anyone cares about lame duck governor and presidential primary punchline DeSantis.
Assuming the ballot measure passes next November, I've got ten bucks right here that says the republican legislature will figure out a way to torpedo it.
Re: the good people of Florida passed a measure in 2018 to give released felons the right to vote, but the legislature stepped in to gut the measure by requiring felons to pay off a big list of fees and other costs before they could vote.
Different situation. Felon voting imperiled the GOP majority (or so they thought). Abortion does not do that-- in fact some Republicans at least may be happy to have the issue, which cuts hard against the GOP, resolved by a public vote.
Florida can send the legislature packing any time they want.
I say we run razor wire and saw blades across Florida's northern border and tell them to go ahead and secede already.
Who do you think you are, Bugs Bunny?