{"id":296,"date":"2024-11-11T07:29:53","date_gmt":"2024-11-11T07:29:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/florida-voters-fail-to-enshrine-abortion-rights-in-the-state-constitution\/"},"modified":"2024-11-11T07:29:53","modified_gmt":"2024-11-11T07:29:53","slug":"florida-voters-fail-to-enshrine-abortion-rights-in-the-state-constitution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/florida-voters-fail-to-enshrine-abortion-rights-in-the-state-constitution\/","title":{"rendered":"Florida voters fail to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution"},"content":{"rendered":"
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NBC News projects that Florida has failed to enshrine\u00a0<\/strong>protections for abortion access in the state constitution, essentially upholding the state\u2019s six-week ban.<\/p>\n

Amendment 4 failed to reach 60% of the vote needed for the proposal to pass, NBC News projects. The ballot initiative faced intense resistance from the start from Republican lawmakers, as well as Gov. Ron DeSantis\u2019 administration. In 2023, as abortion-rights advocates were collecting petition signatures, Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody filed a brief <\/a>with the state Supreme Court urging the justices to prevent the proposed amendment from going before voters. The court ultimately ruled that the proposal could appear on the ballot, while simultaneously upholding Florida\u2019s six-week ban.<\/p>\n

The DeSantis administration then waged what was essentially a campaign of intimidation and misinformation against Amendment 4. The administration oversaw the launch of a website replete with misleading details<\/a> about the proposal, deployed state police<\/a> to question people who had signed the petition, and tried to get TV stations to remove ads supporting Amendment 4<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Republican lawmakers also successfully pushed for revised language alongside the amendment <\/a>that suggested a negative impact on state taxpayers, which Amendment 4 supporters called inaccurate and misleading.<\/a> Three weeks out from Election Day, the DeSantis administration released a report <\/a>accusing the ballot initiative organizers of using fraudulent signatures, and an anti-abortion group filed a lawsuit<\/a> to get the measure removed based on that report.<\/p>\n

Florida is the first state where an abortion rights ballot amendment has failed since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022.<\/p>\n

DeSantis had warned that passage of Amendment 4 would represent \u201cthe end of the pro-life movement.\u201d\u00a0But despite state Republicans\u2019 relentless attacks on the proposal, GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump sought to distance himself from his fellow Florida Republicans\u2019 extreme abortion stance; at one point, he even left open the possibility that he would support Amendment 4<\/a>, though he later walked that back <\/a>after intense criticism from his party.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, when pressed by a reporter on how he voted on Amendment 4, Trump snapped and said, \u201cJust stop talking about that.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Clarissa-Jan Lim<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Clarissa-Jan Lim is a breaking\/trending news blogger for BLN Digital. She was previously a senior reporter and editor at BuzzFeed News.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NBC News projects that Florida has failed to enshrine\u00a0protections for abortion access in the state constitution, essentially upholding the state\u2019s six-week ban. Amendment 4 failed to reach 60% of the vote needed for the proposal to pass, NBC News projects. The ballot initiative faced intense resistance from the start from Republican lawmakers, as well as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":297,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","category-trump"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}