Florida abortion-access amendment fails, keeping 6-week ban in place

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — A Florida amendment that would have enshrined abortion protections in the constitution failed Tuesday, leaving in place the state’s ban on most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.

Amendment 4 got about 57% of the vote as of 9 p.m., a majority, but not enough to meet Florida’s high bar of 60% required for amendment adoption. In nearly any other state, it would have been a victory.

The amendment’s failure is a blow to the coalition of abortion-access groups that raised more than $108 million to get the amendment on ballots and get it passed. It also means that women in the South, whose home states heavily restrict abortion, will not be able to turn to Florida as a refuge. Florida is one of 10 states where abortion rights were on the ballot this year, and Florida has the highest bar for passage.

Amendment 4 would have protected the right to get an abortion until viability, which is generally around 24 weeks of pregnancy. Florida law bans most abortions after six weeks. Since that law was enacted in May, Florida has stopped performing thousands of abortions each month compared to when abortions were allowed up to 15 weeks.

The amendment appeared to secure a majority vote in several of Florida’s conservative counties that former President Donald Trump won Tuesday, including Lake, Polk, Brevard and Volusia. In Miami-Dade, which made a swing for Trump, the amendment got more than 58% of the vote.

The amendment’s defeat is a win for Gov. Ron DeSantis, who opposed the amendment and focused the power of state government on defeating it.

“Tonight, Florida set an example again for the rest of the nation,” Taryn Fenske, a spokesperson for the Vote No on 4 campaign, said in a statement. “Florida’s blueprint proved you can beat the Soros-backed, dark money, out-of-state abortionists with strong, vocal leadership willing to publicly stand for what’s right despite the arrows that come.”

In the last few months before the election, DeSantis traveled across Florida to host news conferences urging people to vote no and painting the amendment as too extreme even for people who support some abortion access. The state’s health agency ran advertisements and created a website countering pro-Amendment 4 talking points, and another state department threatened TV stations with criminal prosecutions if they did not pull a pro-Amendment 4 advertisement off the air. (A federal judge said that action violated the First Amendment.)

DeSantis pressured Florida Republicans to donate to oppose the amendment and leaned on his faith and community initiative to rally against it. DeSantis also appointed a close ally to help craft a financial impact statement that ran alongside the amendment on ballots that raised questions about whether the amendment would force the state to subsidize abortions with public funds. Amendment supporters called that statement a “dirty trick.”

And the DeSantis administration conducted an unprecedented review of already-verified petition signatures used to get the amendment on the ballot, then released a report that accused the Amendment 4 campaign of “widespread” petition fraud.

Amendment supporters said the state’s report was another tactic to undermine support for Amendment 4.

If abortion access groups want to mount a similar amendment in the future, it will likely be harder: DeSantis’ election security office has already called for challenges to Florida’s ballot initiative process.