Reproductive Rights News Roundup – November 3rd 2023

Florida

Moody lays out her arguments against abortion-rights amendment
By Jim Saunders
News Service of Florida
Attorney General Ashley Moody late Tuesday urged the Florida Supreme Court to reject a proposed constitutional amendment that seeks to ensure abortion rights, describing the measure as an effort to “hoodwink” voters.

GOP Attorney General Moody on abortion-rights initiative: A ‘misleading’ bid to ‘hoodwink’ voters
By Michael Moline
Florida Phoenix
Republican Attorney General Ashley Moody notified the Florida Supreme Court weeks ago that she planned to ask the justices to block a proposed Florida Constitutional amendment protecting abortion.

Florida voters are ‘hoodwinked’ alright. But not by women seeking abortion access
By Fabiola Santiago
Miami Herald
The debate over abortion rights in Florida isn’t, as Attorney General Ashley Moody has alleged before the state’s highest court, too hard for voters to understand.

Florida is close to putting abortion protections on the 2024 ballot
By Alexandra Martinez
Prism
Floridians are almost halfway to putting abortion rights on next year’s ballot. The citizen-led ballot initiative campaign Floridians Protecting Freedom is leading the effort to let voters decide whether to make a constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights. Their goal is to collect 1.25 million petitions.

FL’s abortion access is in limbo, but lawmakers are filing proposals for next year’s session
By Jackie Llanos
Florida Phoenix
The future of abortion in Florida remains in limbo because of a pending ruling from the Florida Supreme Court, but lawmakers — both Republicans and Democrats — have been filing proposals for the 2024 legislative session, creating more potential outcomes for the landscape of abortion.

In Miami, Second Gentleman Emhoff tells men to get off the sidelines of abortion fight
By Alyssa Johnson
Miami Herald
Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff traveled to Miami on Friday to hold a conversation about men getting involved in the fight against abortion restrictions, saying that men shouldn’t stay silent about the restrictions on women’s freedom.

Here’s the current state of abortion rights in Florida
By Gabriella Pinos
WUSF Tampa
Nearly a year-and-a-half after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the Florida Supreme Court must decide whether to uphold a 15-week abortion ban signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Group backing DeSantis rolls out ad campaign hitting Trump over abortion remarks
By Julia Manchester
The Hill
The conservative advocacy group And To The Republic rolled out a six-figure ad campaign in Iowa hitting former President Trump over his criticism of six-week abortion bans.

National

Abortion is on the ballot in Ohio. The results could signal what’s ahead for 2024
By Sarah McCammon
NPR
Related AP story: An Ohio amendment serves as a testing ground for statewide abortion fights expected in 2024
When questions about abortion have been put directly to voters in the months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, voters overwhelmingly have signaled support for abortion access.

Ohio GOP politicians have gone to extraordinary lengths to subvert and deceive on Issue 1
By Marilou Johanek
States Newsroom
Quietly purging nearly 27,000 Ohioans from the voter rolls late last month, even as some voting had already begun in the Nov. 7 election, was dirty pool.

Sixty-one people in US criminalized for alleged self-managed abortions, report finds
By Carter Sherman
The Guardian
Between 2000 and 2020, 61 people, including seven minors, were criminally investigated or arrested for allegedly ending their own pregnancies or helping someone else do so, according to a Monday report from If/When/How, a reproductive justice group that helps people deal with legal cases related to pregnancy.

Faced with abortion bans, doctors beg hospitals for help with key decisions
By Caroline Kitchener and Dan Diamond
Washington Post
Amelia Huntsberger pulled up a list of the top administrators at her northern Idaho hospital, anxious last fall to confirm she could treat a patient with a potentially life-threatening pregnancy complication.

First on CNN: Democratic lawmakers call for insurance plans to fully cover over-the-counter birth control pill
By Jacqueline Howard
CNN
Dozens of Democratic lawmakers are urging the Biden administration to require private health insurance plans to fully cover the first over-the-counter birth control pill in the United States, which is expected to hit store shelves starting early next year.

Doctor suing FDA recruited to scientific advisory board to ‘repurpose’ abortion pill
By Sofia Resnick
States Newsroom

One of the anti-abortion doctors suing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to rescind its 2000 approval of a medication abortion regimen on the basis that one of the drugs is dangerous is now consulting on the development of a breast cancer treatment that involves the same drug: mifepristone.