HIALEAH GARDENS, FL—Governor Ron DeSantis blasted Florida's abortion ballot initiative, telling onlookers the amendment is deceptive, illegal, and a money-making scheme.
"The [abortion] amendment is written very deceptively to try to trick as many people to vote for it as possible," DeSantis said at a Wednesday morning press conference. "One of the things that amendment does is it overturns Florida's parental consent for minors law,"
"You have parental consent for anything under the sun, except they're going to take out abortion and put that in the constitution to cut parents out of that. That is unacceptable," DeSantis added. "I can tell you that to nuke parental consent for minors is totally unacceptable. It's bad policy, and it should not be in the state's constitution."
Florida's Parental Consent for Minors Law, signed into law in 2020, requires parents to give consent before their child undergoes a medical procedure. The abortion amendment, meanwhile, specifies parents to be notified before an abortion—but it does not mention anything regarding the consent law.
Democratic Representative Anna Eskamani, a former Planned Parenthood worker, told The Miami Herald that notification is essentially equivalent to consent, stating, "Before [the consent law], a parent had to sign a paper that they were notified, which is basically still consent. If you wanted to block access for your minor, you simply wouldn’t sign.”
DeSantis disagreed, stating, "It's written so broadly that to just take out that notification, which is different than consent, is not going to cut it."
He then urged voters to say "no" to the ballot measure, saying, "This is not something that can just be changed willy-nilly. If they're confusing you, if there's something they're not defining in these terms, and they don't define those terms, just vote no on it."
The Governor's comments follow Florida's Supreme Court's April 1st decision that a constitutional amendment protecting abortion until "fetal viability"—around 24 weeks—can be placed on the November ballot. If at least 60 percent of voters say "yes" to the initiative, it will become Amendment 4 to the state's constitution.
DeSantis turned from what he sees as the misleading and illegal portion of the amendment to the alleged massive amount of money that unnamed people will make off of the amendment.
"When you're doing these amendments, tens of millions of dollars go into getting these things on the ballot," DeSantis said. "There's going to be people that make a lot of money. If these things pass, what are they hiding from you? Why are they trying to pull the wool over your eyes?"
The Governor's office did not respond to a request for comment on which people specifically would financially benefit from the amendment, nor how much money the amendment would cost.
