‘This is a violent attack against women’: Florida Senate candidate seeks to channel abortion outrage

Debbie Mucarsel-Powell: ‘This is a top-of-mind issue … but we’ll see in November how voters decide what are going to be their priorities. I think they’re going to make things very clear.’ Photograph: Wilfredo Lee/AP

A round table on abortion rights, hosted by Florida’s Democratic Senate candidate Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, has only just begun, and already she finds herself comforting a woman in tears with a very personal story to tell.

The woman is from Colombia, and speaks softly in Spanish as she tells the intimate gathering of the Miami-Dade Hispanic Democratic Caucus about the distressing decision her daughter had to make to terminate a pregnancy after learning the fetus was not developing.