Florida pro-choice advocates putting up billboards, running ads, to support reproductive rights
By Lloyd Dunkelberger
Florida Phoenix
State lawmakers returning to Tallahassee next week for their annual session will be greeted by a series of billboards promoting reproductive rights for Florida women. The Floridians for Reproductive Freedom coalition has launched the advertising campaign. Lawmakers have filed a series of bills that aim to sharply restrict a woman’s right to choose to end a pregnancy.
Pro-choice billboards will greet lawmakers driving to session
By Jacob Ogles
Florida Politics
Twenty-four pro-choice billboards now stand in the way of lawmakers and their Tallahassee offices. It’s part of a campaign by the Floridians for Reproductive Freedom coalition in advance of this year’s Legislative Session.
A pro-choice coalition sends a message to lawmakers traveling to Tallahassee next week
By John Lucas
The Capitolist
An abortion rights coalition is launching what it calls a major abortion rights advertising campaign that is aimed at members of the Florida Legislature who will be returning to Tallahassee for the start of the 2019 legislative session on Tuesday.
Should Florida ban abortions after first heartbeat? Legislature considers it.
By Elizabeth Koh
Herald/Times Tallahassee Bureau
Efforts to ban or significantly limit abortion in Florida have long been a fractious endeavor: Though legislators have filed bills nearly every year in the last decade seeking to restrict or prohibit the procedure, they have been met with at best limited success.
Florida Republicans propose ‘fetal heartbeat’ bill to restrict abortion
By Steven Lemongello
Orlando Sentinel
Florida Republican lawmakers this year are proposing a “fetal heartbeat” bill, which could test the limits of abortion restrictions as part of a strategy in GOP-controlled statehouses across the country.
‘It’s A Complex Issue’: Incoming Florida House Speaker Jose Oliva On Abortion
By Jim DeFede
CBS Miami
When the 2019 Florida legislature gavels into session next week, State Representative Jose Oliva, a Republican from Miami Lakes, will be the first representative from Miami-Dade County to hold the speakership since Marco Rubio in 2007 and 2008.
Florida Rep. Jose Oliva Calls Women the ‘Host Body’ While Supporting Restrictive Abortion Legislation
Staff Report
The Daily Beast
Republican Florida State Rep. Jose Oliva has said he would support abortion legislation dictating a “cooling off period” to delay women—whom he described as the “host body”—from going through with the procedure, CBS Miami reports.
Senate rejects “born-alive” bill as anti-abortion advocates reignite “late-term” abortion debate
By Kate Smith
CBS News
The “Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act,” a piece of legislation that echoed existing laws and medical practices, had little chance of passing in the Senate on Monday evening. And as predicted, it ultimately failed.
They had abortions late in their pregnancies. These are their stories
By Jessica Ravitz
CNN
Strangers have called them monsters, trolled them on social media and said their living children should be taken away.
Trump administration issues rule to strip some Planned Parenthood funding
By Alice Miranda Ollstein
Politico
The Trump administration issued a final rule on Friday that could effectively cut off tens of millions of federal family planning dollars to Planned Parenthood and steer some of that funding towards anti-abortion, faith-based care providers.
Foes Of Trump’s Restrictions On Family Planning Clinics See Law On Their Side
By Julie Rovner
Kaiser Health News
State attorneys general and women’s health advocates who are hoping to block in court new Trump administration rules for Title X, the federal family planning program, face one major obstacle: The Supreme Court upheld very similar rules in 1991.
Trump’s Family Planning Rules Are Class Warfare. States Are Ready to Stop Them.
By Nicole Knight
Rewire
When Republican U.S. Rep. Henry Hyde (IL) initially stripped Medicaid recipients of the right to insurance coverage for abortion services more than 40 years ago, he admitted impoverished people made easier targets for his anti-choice crusade than those of means.
Trump Is Inciting Violence Against Abortion Clinics
By Karen Middleton
Rewire
The president’s incendiary tweets about a recent U.S. Senate vote represent an escalation in anti-choice rhetoric that could lead to more violence against abortion providers.
State Bans on Abortion Throughout Pregnancy
Staff Report
Guttmacher Institute
In its landmark 1973 abortion cases, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized a constitutional right to abortion, but held that states could prohibit abortion after fetal viability—the point at which a fetus can sustain life outside the womb—if their policies met certain requirements.
Nicholas Duran bill aims to modernize HIV law
By Jacob Ogles
Florida Politics
Count it a leftover of the AIDS scare in the 1980s: Florida law treats those who knowingly transmit HIV different than any other sexually transmitted disease.
The Republicans of Gilead
By Michelle Goldberg
New York Times
In “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Margaret Atwood’s ever-resonant tale of misogynist dystopia, Christian fascism has a sordid, perverse underbelly.
Birth Control Gets Caught Up in the Abortion Wars
Editorial
New York Times
In its continuing assault on reproductive rights, the Trump administration has issued potentially devastating changes to the nation’s nearly 50-year-old family planning program, Title X, which allows millions of women each year to afford contraception, cancer screenings and other critical health services.