TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Activists with Students for a Democratic Society disrupted a Florida House committee meeting Thursday while lawmakers took up a controversial bill banning abortions after 15 weeks.
After about half an hour of public testimony, Bryan Avila, a Republican and chairperson of the Health Care Appropriations Subcommittee, said he would have to cut public feedback short in the interest of time. Chaos ensued.
Students from around Florida, many of whom had already testified against the bill, were outraged. They began chanting, “Let her speak!” drowning Avila out. With the committee unable to continue its business, the meeting was briefly paused while law enforcement escorted the students from the room.
The students left without incident, chanting “All power to the people!” and “The people united will never be defeated!”
Taylor Cook, 21, a student organizer at the University of South Florida, seized a portable microphone outside the committee building while the House committee paused to clear the room.
“They think they can shut our voices down? They think they can throw us out and deny us our right to speak?” Cook said to the few dozen student activists gathered outside the committee building, adding some expletives. “We pay their bills.”
House Bill 5 would ban most abortions in Florida after 15 weeks. Under the bill, pregnancy would be measured from the last day of the pregnant person’s last menstrual period. The legislation does not come with exceptions for rape or incest. It does include exceptions for times when the life of the mother is endangered, or cases of a ”fatal fetal abnormality.”
Floridians may only obtain an exception in the case of such a fetal abnormality after getting written testimony from two doctors.
The bill cleared the committee on a party-line vote.
Thursday’s meeting underscored the challenge facing the bill’s opponents. An amendment offered by Rep. Kelly Skidmore, a Democrat, to force insurance companies to cover the second doctor’s visit required by law in the case of a fatal fetal abnormality was defeated on a party-line vote.
Before the disruption, the committee did tweak a provision of the bill unrelated to abortion. A new program that would require the state Department of Health to create regional committees to review fetal and infant mortality got its potential funding increased from $260,000 to $1,602,000.
But the vast majority of Thursday’s discussion was about abortion.
In 2020, Florida saw 75,000 abortions, according to the state’s Agency for Health Care Administration. About 4,300 of those procedures were performed during the second trimester — between 13 and 24 weeks of pregnancy. Of those abortions, 20 were performed after cases of rape. Three were performed in cases of incest.
Current Florida law allows abortions up until about 25 weeks of pregnancy.
Opponents of the bill say its abortion provisions would conflict with state and federal precedent governing access to the procedure. Since the landmark Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, the Supreme Court has limited the extent to which states can pass abortion restrictions.
Federal precedent could soon change, however. A Mississippi law passed in 2018 — on which Grall’s abortion measure was modeled — is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court. If the conservative-dominated court rules that law can stand, it could pave the way for a lasting 15-week ban in Florida.
