Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) this week told reporters he is “going to look more significantly” at the Texas heartbeat law as the Florida house speaker signaled state lawmakers will work to “strengthen protections for unborn babies.”
“What they did in Texas was interesting and I haven’t really been able to look enough into it,” DeSantis said during a press conference in West Palm Beach, Florida. “I am going to look more significantly at it.”
Per the AP:
The court by a 5-4 vote denied an emergency appeal from abortion providers and others that sought to block the law’s enforcement. The court said it was not ruling on the law’s constitutionality or blocking further challenges. DeSantis said until the court gives a final ruling, “I wouldn’t read too much into it.”
Florida House Speaker Chris Sprowls, a Republican, signaled he plans to push for pro-life legislation.
“In Florida, we agree that killing an innocent human being with a beating heart is wrong,” he said in a statement:
It is why we have worked every session to strengthen protections for unborn babies, including those for unborn children with disabilities last session, and it is why I am confident that those who share this moral view in the Florida House will continue the fight.
Florida’s Senate Democrat leader Lauren Book, however, warned that any bill in the vein of Texas’s abortion law “would send a clear message to me, and to other survivors of sexual assault, that we do not matter.”
“These kinds of measures are draconian, cruel and have no place in modern society,” she asserted.
On September 1, Texas became the first state in the nation to ban abortion once a fetal heartbeat is detected. Democrats subsequently pounced, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), a Catholic, called the law a “catastrophe for women.”
“SCOTUS’s failure to block #SB8 has delivered catastrophe to women in Texas,” Pelosi tweeted. “This radical law is an all out effort to erase the rights and protections of Roe v Wade.”
“Every woman, everywhere has the constitutional and moral right to basic reproductive health care,” she continued. “We will fight SB8 and all immoral and dangerous attacks on women’s health and freedoms with all our strength”:
Planned Parenthood also reacted sharply, claiming the Lone Star State is “forcing people to stay pregnant against their will.”
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