A federal judge has ordered Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration to stop threatening to prosecute local TV stations for airing a political ad promoting an abortion-right referendum that will be on November's ballot.
In a sharply worded ruling, U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker of the Northern District of Florida issued a temporary restraining order calling threats by the Florida Department of Health "unconstitutional coercion."
“To keep it simple for the State of Florida: it’s the First Amendment, stupid,” Walker wrote in his ruling.
At the center of the legal dispute is Amendment 4, a measure that would add an amendment to the state constitution to protect the right to abortion until fetal viability, which is considered to be somewhere over 20 weeks into pregnancy. The amendment would undo a six-week abortion law that took effect earlier this year.
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The group behind the campaign in support of the abortion-rights ballot measure, Floridians Protecting Freedom, produced the commercial, which features a Tallahassee mother describing how she was diagnosed with brain cancer when she was 20 weeks pregnant before a series of state restrictions went into effect.
“The doctors knew that if I did not end my pregnancy, I would lose my baby, I would lose my life, and my daughter would lose her mom,” she says, adding that the state’s current law would not have allowed the abortion she received before she could begin cancer treatment.
Earlier this month, the health department sent cease-and-desist letters to dozens of local TV stations that aired the ad, including NBC Miami, saying it could invoke a “sanitary nuisance” law and initiate criminal proceedings against them. At least one station stopped airing the ad, the judge noted in his ruling, writing that it served as "further evidence of its coercive nature."
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Floridians Protecting Freedom filed a lawsuit accusing the state of "using public resources and government authority to advance the State’s preferred characterization of its anti-abortion laws as the ‘truth’ and denigrate opposing viewpoints as ‘lies.’"
The lawsuit named Florida's Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who heads the state's health department, and its former general counsel, John Wilson, as defendants. Wilson resigned from the position last week.
In his ruling, Walker argued that while the state can continue to campaign against the amendment, it cannot "trample on" the free speech of the plaintiff.
"While Defendant Ladapo refuses to even agree with this simple fact, Plaintiff’s political advertisement is political speech — speech at the core of the First Amendment," Walker said. "The government cannot excuse its indirect censorship of political speech simply by declaring the disfavored speech is 'false.'"
In a statement, the campaign director for Floridians Protecting Freedom called the court's decision a "critical initial victory."
“The court has affirmed what we’ve known all along: the government cannot silence the truth about Florida’s extreme abortion ban," Lauren Brenzel said. "It’s a deadly ban that puts women’s lives at risk. This ruling is a powerful reminder that Floridians will not back down in the face of government intimidation."
Florida is one of nine states with a measure on the Nov. 5 ballot to protect access to abortion.
According to the media tracking firm AdImpact, it's also the most expensive — with about $150 million in ads spent so far, The Associated Press reports. That spending total includes millions the state Republican Party has spent, at DeSantis’ behest, to urge voters to reject the question.
For the ballot measure to be adopted in Florida, it needs support of 60% of those who vote on it.
DeSantis has vowed to defeat Amendment 4 and used allies in his administration to leverage state agencies against the measure, including using the Florida Department of Health to launch a website attacking the ballot measure and the Office of Election Crimes and Security, an election police unit created by DeSantis, to start investigating claims of fraud in the signature-gathering process approved for the ballot. That office issued a report claiming a “large number of forged signatures or fraudulent petitions” were submitted to get the question on the ballot. The state also announced a $328,000 fine against the ballot-measure group.
Read Judge Walker's ruling:
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
