The Quickie: Florida Personhood Bill Signals Next Wave Of Attacks On Abortion

Welcome to “The Quickie” — Planned Parenthood Action Fund’s daily tipsheet on the top health care & reproductive rights stories of the day. You can read “The Quickie'' online here.

In today’s Quickie: Florida Senate committee to hear fetal personhood bill, and our state fights round up.

FLORIDA PERSONHOOD BILL SIGNALS NEXT WAVE OF ATTACKS ON ABORTION: Today, a Florida Senate committee will hear a bill that would create a form of personhood for fetuses, signaling the next wave of attacks on abortion in the state. SB 476 would allow parents to recover civil damages for the wrongful death of an “unborn child” — a term that is undefined in the law. According to the Huffington Post, this omission could open the door to penalties for abortion providers and even for providers of IVF. 

When pressed, the bill’s House sponsor, Rep. Jenna Persons-Mulicka, demurred on whether IVF could be implicated — but she didn’t close that door. “Is an embryo an unborn child? I think that falls outside the scope of this bill, but in terms of this bill you’d have to show a wrongful act, which is intentional or negligence in order to recover,” she said. Persons-Mulicka and her Senate counterpart Erin Grall were also the sponsors of the state’s abortion bans. 

With a conservative supermajority in state government, the threat from this personhood bill and others like it is real. 

Read more at The Huffington Post, and watch today’s Senate Judiciary hearing at 2:30 ET.

 

STATE FIGHTS ROUND UP: One month into the 2024 state legislative session, more than 245 anti-abortion bills have been filed in 35 states. On the proactive side, over 265 bills have been filed in 35 states. 

• Kentucky: Last week, reproductive rights champions introduced multiple bills to restore and protect access to sexual and reproductive health care in Kentucky. For example: 
  • HB 428 would repeal dozens of state statutes that limit reproductive access, including 2019 and 2022 abortion bans.
  • HB 430 would require the long-standing Health Access Nurturing Development Services (HANDS) program to provide the families it serves with information about maternal and postpartum depression.
• Idaho: The House State Affairs Committee voted to send HB 421 to the House floor, despite a lack of support during the public hearing last week. The bill conflates the definitions of “sex” and “gender,” while also failing to acknowledge the existence and experience of trans, nonbinary, and intersex people. In positive news, a bill mandating that insurance companies dispense up to six months of birth control at a time for Idahoans (SB 1234) was sent to the Senate floor. SB 1234 received unanimous support from testifiers.
• Iowa: An Iowa Senate subcommittee advanced SB 3114, a bill that aims to remove many of the already-minimal accountability standards for the state and third-party contractors overseeing the MOMS program, which currently directs $2 million in taxpayer funds to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers. The bill’s House counterpart is also advancing. The Senate also passed SB 2095, a “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” that could potentially allow religion to be used as a justification to discriminate. 

The hostile sex education bill HB 2031 also advanced through a subcommittee last week. The bill would mandate that students watch an anti-abortion video produced by Live Action as part of a “human development” curriculum. This video, titled "Meet Baby Olivia," is misleading, medically inaccurate, and explicitly asserts that life begins at fertilization. 

• Utah: Last week, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox signed into law an anti-transgender bathroom bill (HB 257) and an anti-DEI bill (HB 261).
• New Hampshire: A proposed 15-day abortion ban (HB1248), and a bill prohibiting any abortion clinic from performing abortions after 15 weeks with so-called “born alive” provisions (HB1541) both failed to move forward this week. CACR 23, a bipartisan proposal to explicitly add the right to abortion into the state constitution, failed to meet the 60% majority needed in the House to move forward. New Hampshire is the only state in New England where the right to abortion is not explicitly protected in state law or the constitution.
• Missouri: The Senate Local Government and Elections Committee advanced legislation to raise the threshold for passing a ballot initiative from 51% to a majority of votes statewide and in a majority of the state’s congressional districts. Reminder: Missourians for Constitutional Freedom is working to gain enough signatures to put abortion access on the ballot this November. A bill proposing an anti-abortion constitutional amendment (SJR 87) has also been introduced.
• Mississippi: Mississippi became the latest state to introduce a so-called “abortion trafficking” bill. HB 713 makes it a felony to help a minor obtain an abortion without parental consent. Similar bills have been introduced in Tennessee and Oklahoma, and on Friday the Ninth Circuit denied the state of Idaho’s request to lift the injunction currently blocking that state’s “trafficking” law passed in 2023. 

An anti-democracy (HRC 11) measure is expected to be heard in a Senate committee on Tuesday. The bill would reinstate a referendum process in the state but would prohibit the use of the initiative process to make any constitutional changes or to make statutory changes on particular issues, including abortion, so-called “right to work”, and local laws, among other issues. There has not been a referendum process in Mississippi in 3 years. A similar bill has been tried in the House in recent years but has failed in the Senate.

• Maine: On Thursday, the Judiciary Committee voted to advance LD 780, a constitutional amendment that would enshrine the right to reproductive autonomy in the state’s constitution. LD 780 needs a two-thirds vote in the Senate and House before going to voters for approval. Last month more than 100 people testified in support of the bill.
• Alaska: Legislators introduced SJR 2, a resolution to eliminate the state’s strong constitutional protections for abortion.