Several abortion rights groups such as Planned Parenthood and the Abortion Care Network submitted an amicus brief last December to the Supreme Court opposing the Mississippi law and the overruling of Roe, asserting the new law “would cause grave harm” to countless numbers of women in the region.
The likelihood of survival is generally considered to be after around 23 or 24 weeks, which was legally affirmed in the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. This is a time where these babies have beating hearts, they can move, they can taste, they can see, they can feel pain, they can suck their thumbs, and they have brain waves.” The governor’s remarks are devoid of scientific evidence and run directly at odds with the medical concept of “fetal viability,” the point at which a fetus can survive outside the womb. Every unborn child is a special and unique human being deserving of protection from harm and the chance to grow up in a loving family,” Simpson said.ĭeSantis argued that HB 5 “protects the rights of unborn children starting at 15 weeks. We are blessed to be Floridians because behind me stands the most pro-life governor in America.”įlorida Senate President Wilton Simpson provocatively declared: “Abortion kills children and forever changes the life of mothers, the father and the entire extended family. Speaking in front of a church audience at Thursday’s signing, Florida House Speaker Chris Sprowls proclaimed: “Like many of you, I believe that life is a gift from God. In justifying the most stringent abortion law in the state’s history, Republican lawmakers combined invocations of religious dogma with anti-scientific conceptions. “As a woman, I refuse to accept such a perverse version of equality.” “The reality of the Roe decision is that men on the Supreme Court proclaimed that women, in order to achieve equality with men, must be able to kill their own children,” Grall declared. Erin Grall, the Florida bill’s sponsor, introduced the legislation with inflammatory and reactionary remarks that directly challenged the landmark 1973 decision of the US Supreme Court in Roe v. HB 5 is modeled after Mississippi’s 2018 Gestational Age Act, an abortion ban that allows the operation after 15 weeks “only in medical emergencies or for severe fetal abnormality,” and has no exception for rape or incest. The legislation went to DeSantis’ desk after it passed the Republican-controlled state senate by a vote of 23–15 along party lines. Ron DeSantis speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Feb.