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We Are About to Find Out if Florida Republicans Really Want to End Abortion

With a Republican governor and supermajorities in both legislative houses, Democrats won’t be to blame if abortion stays legal in 2023, writes Zac Howard, reporter with The Florida Standard.

Conservatives in Florida have spent the last few months celebrating the red wave that crashed on the once purple state. Americans from around the country fled to the Sunshine State so they could live under a governor who had the backbone to stand up to the media’s COVID madness and the LGBTQ mob.

Unfortunately, Florida has also become a destination for parents who want to kill their preborn children but are deterred from doing so in their home state. Currently the state prohibits abortions after 15 weeks of gestation. Given that 90 percent of women get abortions before 12 weeks, the law only protects a small percentage of preborn children.

Amid all the victory laps and celebrations, nothing more than lip service has been given to the weakest and most vulnerable Floridians who cannot yet vote or even speak.

KILLING THE INNOCENT FOR HALF A CENTURY

America has permitted the execution of little boys and girls in the womb for fifty years now, after the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) ruled on January 22, 1973 that the Constitution did not protect their right to life. Politicians play football with the freedoms of these little ones while parents flock by the thousands to death clinics to have a professional hit man in a white coat butcher their own sons and daughters.

Abortion is the leading cause of death across the country at an annual rate of roughly one million nationwide. In 2020, there were over 200,000 more deaths caused by abortions than those caused by heart disease – the ailment officially cited as the leading cause of death in the U.S.

NO MORE EXCUSES

For the past five decades, Republican legislators in every state have argued that they were incapable of helping the preborn until SCOTUS revised its opinion on the matter. This was a lie that flew in the face of federalism – the constitutional tenet that Republicans had no issues citing for plenty of other issues in Florida. Regardless, SCOTUS finally did change its opinion and told the states to decide for themselves if they think preborn children should be protected.

With Roe overturned, and Republican supermajorities in both the Florida House and Senate, the GOP has no more excuses for leaving Session without ensuring legal protection for the preborn. Democrats aren’t able to get in their way. In theory, the legislature wouldn’t even need a signature from Governor DeSantis, who has been uncharacteristically ambiguous on this issue.

DOES LIFE BEGIN AT CONCEPTION?

I recently sat down with a sitting Florida lawmaker and pleaded with him to push for equal protection from the moment of conception. Equal protection means that parents who kill their four-week-old preborn son should be held legally accountable in the same way that they would be if they murdered their four-year-old son.

From a legislative standpoint, the only relevant question in the abortion debate is whether or not life begins at conception. Most biologists think so – and Republicans insist that it does – yet they refuse to act upon that professed conviction.

Perhaps that is because most of America’s largest Pro-Life groups vehemently oppose legislation that provides equal protection, insisting that all mothers are victims. I wonder what the Pro-Life establishment thinks about a mother performing a self-administered abortion. Does the state have any obligation to protect preborn children in such instances?

Treating abortion as homicide is considered extreme by many conservatives and blasphemy by the Left. Political dispositions aside, the view is logically consistent if life indeed begins at conception.

Pro-choice columnist Jay Bookman recently acknowledged this point, writing: “If you honestly, sincerely believe that human life begins at the moment that sperm is introduced to egg, certain conclusions flow logically from that starting point, including that abortion is murder and that banning abortion is a moral obligation on a par with banning slavery.”

So the real question is whether or not Republicans in Florida will act upon their professions. Do they really believe life begins at conception? Do they even care if it does? We will have our answers by the end of the Legislative session.

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