Editorial: If Amendment 4 passes, parents will keep rights over minors' pregnancy options

Among the many fictions and near-fictions used to manipulate and mislead Floridians on Amendment 4, one stands out.

It’s the deliberate effort to blur the line between state law requiring parental consent before a girl under age 18 can have an abortion, and parental notification, which is protected by the state constitution.

The issue is confusing only because the governor and those desperately trying to kill the amendment limiting government interference in abortion have made it so. That’s deliberate, says state Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando — Amendment 4 opponents know how unpopular the state’s 6-week abortion ban is, so they are seizing on misleading hypotheticals to lead voters to decide on extreme examples.

Nothing in Amendment 4 overrides state law requiring that a parent or guardian must be notified when a minor girl seeks an abortion. Voters specifically gave lawmakers the right to create that law through a constitutional amendment that passed 20 years ago.

Amendment 4 does not change that. Just the opposite, it clearly states: “This amendment does not change the Legislature’s constitutional authority to require notification to a parent or guardian before a minor has an abortion.”

On consent, it’s silent

Florida also passed a law requiring parental consent for abortions in 2020. But the state constitution says nothing about consent. Neither does Amendment 4.

Opponents want voters to believe that because Amendment 4 is silent on parental consent, it’s a devious legal scheme to allow minors to secretly get abortions. Gov. Ron DeSantis has suggested just that: “Why would you take away parental consent?” he asked in April.

Speculation about girls under 18 getting abortions without an adult’s consent is presented as a new, unheard-of challenge to parental rights.

But the governor and those who parrot this argument omit an inconvenient truth. A girl under 18 can already get a legal abortion in Florida without a parent or guardian’s consent. She can petition a court to allow the procedure.

This high-profile legal exception to requiring consent has been on the books since the consent law was passed four years ago. DeSantis and anti-abortion activists know it.

Peddling scare tactics

Footnote facts, however, tend to puncture disinformation campaigns, and confuse voters about what Amendment 4 actually says is key to the scare tactics being peddled by opponents.

Take the jury-rigged financial statement at the bottom of Amendment 4 on the ballot.

It’s not the original financial statement that estimated how much the amendment might cost and found no concrete evidence of potential costs. That got tossed out. A new review panel was convened, one that included a top DeSantis aide and a contributor to the Heritage Foundation’s notorious Project 2025. The disastrous new findings: Public schools could go broke. The state could get sued and lose. Medicaid, the taxpayer-funded health insurance program for low-income Floridians, could be forced to pay for abortions for poor women.

Unless none of it happens: At the very bottom, even the new committee wrote that it was impossible to know for sure.

But imagine it did, voters are told. Imagine 13-year-olds sneaking out to get abortions, or doctors, parents and medical staffers casually murdering newborns or dentists providing surgical abortions. Imagine a woman claiming a headache is a medical condition, justifying a nine-month abortion.

Imagine all the worst-case scenarios that will fit in a 30-second commercial. And you have to imagine them, because no facts support this nonsense, just fevered speculation of people hoping to scare voters into voting no.

Notification is here to stay

This, however, is not speculative: A parent or guardian’s right to be notified before a minor gets an abortion is essentially enshrined in the state constitution. Amendment 4 will not change that.

Nor will it change the fact that parents have nearly unlimited rights over the health care their children receive. Once they are notified, it would be easy for a parent to block access to abortion care. And ducking parental notification would require a judge’s permission — which would be extremely difficult for a teenager to secure, especially in a way that would meet the documentation clinics are forced to produce, Eskamani says. She speaks from experience: When she worked for Planned Parenthood of Central Florida, she observed minors seeking abortions. She also agrees that most teenagers would want and need their parents’ support during a difficult time. A national survey of more than 1,500 minors who had abortions found that more than 61% of all minors told at least one parent before seeking abortion care. That number rose to more than 90% for minors under the age of 15.

A state Legislature like Florida’s that has been gerrymandered into supermajority conservatism will never pass a law eliminating the current requirement for parental consent.

Finally, if Amendment 4 passes and is subsequently used to argue that the state’s parental consent law should be tossed, that legal case will ultimately be heard by Florida’s hard-right Supreme Court. Any legal challenge to parental consent would almost certainly fail before the court, whose members include three justices who argued to keep Amendment 4 off the ballot and who were hand-picked by an anti-abortion governor well aware of their anti-abortion views. Even if the existing law is stricken under the Amendment 4 language, it will be dauntingly difficult for teens to access abortions.

Should the amendment somehow survive the disinformation campaign pushed by Tallahassee, it would change something more basic. It would protect women, girls and those who love them from a state government intent on dictating decisions about their bodies, their health and their future.

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The Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board includes Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson, Opinion Editor Krys Fluker and Viewpoints Editor Jay Reddick. The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman and Anderson. Send letters to insight@orlandosentinel.com.

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