A new political reality will hit Florida with the force of an asteroid this coming week, bringing chaos for those dealing with the real life consequences of a US Supreme Court abortion ruling ending a woman’s right to choose, and destroying the convenient wisdom that says the Sunshine State is a foregone conclusion for Donald Trump.
Like many elderly New Yorkers, the 45th President is now a resident of Florida. He carried its 30 electoral college votes in two successive elections and was expected to cruise to a third victory when Floridans go to the polls in November.
So why was Joe Biden down in Tampa this week, landing haymakers on a guy who wants to take his place? The answer is the abortion issue. “Now in America today in 2024, women have fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers had — because of Donald Trump,” he told a crowd in Tampa.
Biden’s predecessor, and now opponent, had no immediate response and not just because he was in New York, up to his neck in the mud of a criminal trial. The problem for the King of Mar-a-Lago is that for once in life he finds himself unable to squirm his way out of the mess he created.
Biden was right. The women of Florida are about to find themselves with fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers had and that’s just a fact. From Wednesday, a six-week abortion ban will take effect in the state. Anyone who receives such treatment beyond that - and any doctor who gives it - will face criminal charges and punishment on conviction of up to five years in prison. The countdown is on and there is panic at large, with health care providers across the state reporting a flood of patients seeking an abortion before the deadline falls. Ignorance and confusion abound.
Dr Chelsea Daniels, a fellow at Physicians for Reproductive Health and an abortion provider in South Florida, told the Orlando Sentinel website this week that many patients she had spoken to had no idea the abortion ban was imminent.
“When May 1 comes we’re going to have patients coming in further along than six weeks and having no clue that they’re not able to get an abortion. And I think that it’s really hard to overstate the panic that those people are going to feel.”
Planned Parenthood, the most prominent reproductive health care provider in the US, is busy organising alternative arrangements for women who will inevitably find themselves in such a position. Abortions are available in North Carolina up to 12 weeks. After 12 weeks, the closest states offering the treatment are Virginia and Illinois - only for those who can afford the cost of travel, of course.
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All of this madness in 2024. And all of this because 22 months ago the US Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v Wade decision that had enshrining a woman’s constitutional right to choose when it came to her own reproductive health care. Trump appointed the three conservative judges who helped blow up that status quo and gave individual states the right to pass their own abortion laws.
In places like Alabama and Tennessee that means abortion is now a criminal offence in almost every circumstance. The Arizona Supreme Court, infamously, ruled that an anti-abortion law written in 1864 should remain on the statute book.
Barely a week now passes without reports of rape and incest victims being forced to give birth or travel to more ‘liberal’ states seeking the health care they need. Mainstream America, which regularly polls majority backing for abortion rights, is inevitably appalled by such stories but Trump being Trump, brags about what he has done.
“I broke Roe versus Wade, and I’m proud of it. They said it couldn’t be done and I did it,’’ he has said repeatedly.
This new patchwork system, where Republican politicians in Southern states compete to outdo each other on the scale of illiberal cruelty, is “working brilliantly”, apparently. “Now the states are working their way through it. And you’re gonna, you’re having some very, very beautiful harmony, to be honest with you. You have, well, you have some cases like Arizona that went back to like 1864. But I disagree with that.”
The former President would never publicly admit to any personal flaws but surely he can smell his own bullshit. Even he knows he can’t have it both ways - he can’t celebrate the demise of Roe v Wade and complain about the consequences at the same time.
To assist Trump to get his dialectic ducks in line the Biden campaign has devoted enormous resources to remind him, and the voting public, of the damage he was wrought. Since the beginning of March, the Democrats have spent $27 million on television advertising (three times what the GOP has spent) and it’s estimated that 90% of those adverts have addressed the abortion issue. This pounding has been going on since late last year.
The ads themselves have been visceral and raw, focusing on the victims of abortion bans that made no exceptions for victims of rape. An advert aired in a Kentucky gubernatorial election had a young women tell her own story. “I was raped by my stepfather after years of sexual abuse,” she said. “I was 12. Anyone who believes there should be no exceptions for rape and incest could never understand what it’s like to stand in my shoes.”
Biden drove home a broader theme in his Tampa speech. “Trump is literally taking us back 160 years. He says it's up to the states – this is all about states' rights. But he's wrong. The Supreme Court was wrong. There should be a constitutional right in the federal Constitution, a federal right, and it shouldn't matter where in America you live. This isn't about states' rights, it's about women's rights."
This is a tried and tested message, one perfected in dozens of elections across states as politically diverse as New York and Kansas since June 2022. Democratic election candidates and statewide campaigns have focused almost entirely on womens’ reproductive rights to stunning effect, including in solidly Republican Ohio, which last year voted to enshrine abortion rights in the state’s constitution.
When Florida goes to the polls in November voters will almost certainly support a similar amendment to the state constitution protecting abortion rights up to 24 weeks. If, in doing so, they also pass judgement on the guy who took those rights away from women in the first place then Trump is almost certainly doomed. If he loses his adopted home state then he loses the election.
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