Florida Threatens Local TV Station With Prosecution Over ‘Dangerous’ Pro-Choice Ad
The Florida Department of Health has sent a cease and desist order to a local news station, demanding that it stop airing an advertisement in support of a ballot initiative seeking to overturn Florida’s six-week abortion ban.Â
The ad, produced by the advocacy group Floridians Protecting Freedom, depicts a Tampa woman named Caroline discussing how she was diagnosed with terminal Stage 4 brain cancer while 20 weeks pregnant. In order to start treatment to prolong her life, she needed an abortion.
“The doctors knew that if I did not end my pregnancy, I would lose my baby. I would lose my life. And my daughter would lose her mom,” she said. “Florida has now banned abortion even in cases like mine. Amendment 4 is going to protect women like me.” Amendment 4, which Floridians will vote on in November, would prohibit Florida from banning abortions before viability, which is typically placed around 24 weeks of pregnancy.Â
However, the department’s letter claims that WCJB, a Gainesville-area news station, cannot legally air the ad because its content is “false” and “dangerous,” and therefore subject to Florida law banning “sanitary nuisances” that threaten the “health or lives of individuals.”
The department argued that because Florida’s abortion law allows for abortions to prevent serious risk of “physical impairment of a major bodily function,” Caroline would have, in fact, been able to get an abortion under Florida’s law. By suggesting that Florida doctors can’t perform abortions in cases like Caroline’s, the department contends that the ad could lead women to “foreseeably travel out of state to seek emergency medical care, seek emergency medical care from unlicensed providers in Florida, or not seek emergency medical care at all.”
While Florida’s six-week ban contains a provision allowing abortions whe
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