Rory Leishman:
It was on June 24, 2022, that the Supreme Court of the UIt was a banner day for pro-lifers when the United States Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson (2022) overturned Roe v. Wade (1973), the infamous ruling that purported to find a right to abortion hidden in the United States Constitution. According to Human Life Review, 18 states have taken advantage of Dobbs to enact laws prohibiting abortion throughout a pregnancy with very few exceptions. Another seven states have also banned abortion throughout most, but not all, of a pregnancy.
However, as regular readers of The Interim are painfully aware, the remaining 25 states have enacted permissive abortion laws, sometimes with no restrictions. Since Dobbs, the pro-life movement has also lost 11 of 14 state referenda on abortion. What accounts for these grievous setbacks?
Much of the problem can be traced to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Since then, most people in the United States have no longer been able to grasp the hitherto self-evident truth that all human life is sacred.
The same is also true of most people in Canada. Recent opinion polls have found that despite the best educational efforts of pro-lifers in Canada and the United States, fewer than 12 per cent of adults in either country now understand that abortion is an evil that can never be justified.
Even so, pro-life leaders and organizations in the United States have had considerable success in persuading elected legislators to study the issue of abortion, to ponder the irrefutable scientific evidence that human life begins at conception and to come to the conclusion that all human beings in the womb have a right to life; this means that Republican legislators in half the states have been induced to enact severe restrictions on abortion.
However, in some states, such legislation has proven to be only a fleeting accomplishment. Last year in Ohio, for example, pro-abortionists got the state law restricting abortion overturned in a state referendum.
Like Ohio, Florida allows for constitutional amendments by a citizen-initiated referendum. Given the disastrous pro-life setback in Ohio, Florida’s pro-life Republican Governor Ron DeSantis and his Republican colleagues in the state legislature realized there was no point in adopting a comprehensive ban on abortion that was bound to be overturned in a state referendum. Therefore, they settled for the Heart Beat Protection Act, a partial measure which came into effect on May 1, 2024 that bans abortion after six weeks gestation or up to 15 weeks in cases of rape, incest or risk to the mother’s life.
DeSantis and his pro-life allies calculated that in a referendum campaign, they could persuade a majority of Florida voters that at least a baby in the womb with a detectable heartbeat should be cherished in life and protected in law. However, even a six-week restriction on abortion was too much for Donald Trump. In a brutal betrayal of the pro-life movement, he denounced the Heart Beat Protection Act as “a terrible thing and a terrible mistake.”
As expected, pro-abortionists in Florida initiated a referendum to overturn the Heart Beat Protection Act. Their proposed Amendment 4 to the state constitution provided: “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 provider.” With more than $100 million in funding, pro-abortionists mounted a relentless campaign to get Amendment 4 adopted by the voters.
The pro-abortionists also got solid backing from mainstream media like The New York Times and The Globe and Mail. Together, they repeatedly published reports with false or profoundly misleading statements such as Amendment 4 “would ensure the right to an abortion in Florida until a fetus is viable.”
DeSantis coordinated a vigorous campaign to counter Amendment 4 and defend the Heart Beat Protection Act. As he pointed out, under the plain terms of Amendment 4 as interpreted by the courts, a “healthcare provider” — that is to say, an abortionist — can legally perpetrate an abortion on even a nearly full-term, healthy baby provided only that the mother requests the abortion and the abortionist deems that continuation of the pregnancy would harm the mother’s “emotional” health. (See Doe v. Bolton, 1973)
In the end, DeSantis and his pro-life allies won, but barely: Amendment 4 obtained 57 per cent of the vote, three points short of the 60 per cent needed to adopt an amendment to the state constitution in Florida
Clearly, enactment of a complete ban on abortion in Florida would have achieved next to nothing, because it would have been overturned in a referendum. In contrast, the less-than-perfect Heart Beat Protection Act will now stand and save tens of thousands of lives every year.
By any reasonable measure, that, too, is a tremendous pro-life victory.
