DeSantis is trying to silence cancer patients who speak out about abortion

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is using the full weight of the Florida government to block a ballot measure that would protect abortion access in the state – including by involving government lawyers in a campaign to kill a young mother Silencing terminal brain cancer warning about the danger Florida's strict ban poses to women like her.

This November, Floridians will have the opportunity to vote on Amendment 4; If passed, the measure will enshrine the right to abortion “prior to viability or when necessary to protect the health of the patient” in the Florida Constitution. The proposal has been popular among Floridians: a September poll showed the measure had support from 76 percent of voters.

But DeSantis, who has enacted two separate abortion bans — first limiting the procedure to 15 weeks and then 6 weeks of pregnancy — is desperately trying to defeat Amendment 4. First, he worked with the Heritage Foundation to add language to the ballot measure implying that relegalizing abortion would have a negative fiscal impact on the state. Amid this unfounded warning, state officials began spending public money on television and radio ads that spread misinformation about the measure, as well as a website that claimed that Amendment 4 “endangers the safety of women.”

Now DeSantis is trying to stop a cancer patient named Caroline from telling the story of her abortion by threatening to prosecute television stations that show Amendment 4 ads featuring her story.

When she was first pregnant, Caroline was terribly sick every nine months. The second time started comparatively like child's play. “Her pregnancy was going so smoothly – until everything happened,” she says.

Caroline, their last name Rolling Stone who agreed to withhold speech for privacy and safety reasons, was already 18 weeks old when she began to lose her speech. “I could read and understand a book, but the words that came out of my mouth were different,” she says. “At first I thought it might be pregnancy brain, until within a week it got so bad that I was teaching a class and it closely resembled the symptoms of a stroke – I couldn't speak, I couldn't read, I “I was very confused and my sister, who is a nurse, told me to go to the hospital.”

Because she was pregnant, the hospital was cautious: She couldn't have a CT scan out of concern for her baby; but she was able to get an MRI – without contrast. The results came back showing a large mass in the language area of ​​her brain – but without the detail that contrast could provide, it was hard to tell what it was. Her doctors said it was possibly a hemorrhagic stroke or some type of brain hemorrhage. Or it could be a tumor.

Caroline's medical team advised her to wait and see if what was seen in the image could be reabsorbed into her brain. “But within a week,” she says, “I felt much worse. The crowd grew a lot, and by then I couldn’t tell what month it was, what day, who the president was – nothing.”

She was advised to undergo surgery during which a malignant tumor was discovered – a grade IV glioma. Glioblastoma is the deadliest form of brain cancer; There is no cure and treatment can only slow progression. According to the National Brain Tumor Society, fewer than 7 percent of patients survive five years after diagnosis.

It was at this point that Caroline realized that she would have to terminate her pregnancy in order to receive treatment for her cancer. “I just wanted to see my little girl again,” she says. “I also wanted to keep my baby. But… I couldn’t have done chemo or radiation, and they wanted me to get on with it as quickly as possible because my tumor was growing very quickly.”

When Caroline received the positive diagnosis, she was already 21 weeks old. It was 2022 and abortion was still legal in Florida, the state where she had lived for more than 20 years. The abortion took two days and was emotionally devastating — “absolutely the hardest decision I've ever made in my life,” she says — but she was able to terminate her pregnancy at a facility near her home.

Today, Florida has a six-week abortion ban – one of the strictest restrictions in the country, with extremely limited exceptions and extraordinarily high requirements to take advantage of those exceptions. (DeSantis signed the law, which took effect a little less than a year after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the bill Roe v. Calf, Ending the federal right to abortion.)

Caroline is speaking out about her abortion in support of Amendment 4, the ballot measure that would enshrine the right to access an abortion in the Florida Constitution if approved by at least 60 percent of Florida voters in November.

“The doctors knew that if I didn't terminate my pregnancy, I would lose my baby, I would lose my life and my daughter would lose her mother,” Caroline says in a TV spot for the campaign that aired last week. “Florida has now banned abortions even in cases like mine.”

The day after the ad began airing, DeSantis' Health Department, through its general counsel John Wilson, sent a letter to Florida-based television stations with the ad, calling Caroline's claims and the ad itself “false” and “dangerous.” “hygienic nuisance” and threatened the television stations with criminal sanctions if the ad was not removed within 24 hours. (The logic of “sanitary nuisance” is circuitous, but essentially Wilson argues that the complaint endangers the lives of women in Florida and thus constitutes a crime of the kind that the Department of Health has the authority to prosecute.)

Wilson claims Florida's ban does this not Preventing women in Caroline's situation from having an abortion – it would just make the process extremely stressful for a cancer patient like her. “An abortion may be performed if two physicians certify in writing that, based on reasonable medical judgment, the termination of the pregnancy is necessary to save the life of the pregnant woman or to avert the serious risk of significant and irreversible physical impairment of a serious body a function of the pregnant woman other than mental illness,” Wilson writes.

A recent report from Physicians for Human Rights recounts similar obstacles faced by a patient suffering from late-stage pancreatic cancer after she unexpectedly became pregnant. “Because she was receiving chemotherapy and radiation on and off for almost five years, and because of her relapses, her periods had been irregular for ages… She always wanted to get pregnant but was never able to because of her treatments,” one woman's gynecologist told researchers . “Her oncologist said, 'We have to stop treatment unless you have an abortion, especially because it poses a risk to the pregnancy.'”

In this case, it took more than a week for that doctor to obtain the specific documentation that would justify a health exception under Florida's ban and then arrange for an abortion at a hospital that could accommodate her medical risks, a four-hour drive away home.

“They want to grab these Supreme Court justices and bring them in the room and say, look what you're doing to people,” the woman's doctor told PHR. “For heaven’s sake, let this woman receive palliative chemotherapy because it’s the least we can do for her.”

Lawyers representing Amendment 4 accuse the Department of Health of an “unconstitutional attempt to force the broadcaster to censor protected speech” and are calling on the broadcasters to keep the ad on the air. “Not only is this a baseless request, it is an unconstitutional government action,” wrote attorneys at Elias Law Group. “The letter is a prime example of government coercion in violation of the First Amendment.”

Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel seems to agree. “Broadcasters’ right to freely express themselves is enshrined in the First Amendment,” Rosenworcel said in a statement Tuesday. “Threats against broadcasters for broadcasting content that contradicts the government’s views are dangerous and undermine the fundamental principle of freedom of expression.”

Lawyers for Amendment 4 continue to dispute Wilson's characterization of the ad. “Caroline’s diagnosis was fatal. This effectively means that an abortion would not have saved her life, only prolonged it,” they write, arguing that Florida's ban provides no exceptions for such cases and attaching a signed statement from a doctor attesting to this fact.

So far, DeSantis' administration appears to be losing the argument. As of Tuesday, no television station in Florida had agreed to remove Caroline's ad.