What Florida’s New Abortion Law Is, What It’s Impact Will Be & Mayday

What Florida’s New Abortion Law Is, What It’s Impact Will Be & Mayday - Top 3 Takeaways – May 1st, 2024  

1. A matter of life and death. It was signed into law over a year ago (April 13th of last year to be exact) and after a series of twists and turns that ended with a ruling by Florida’s Supreme Court, today’s the day that Florida’s new abortion law is in effect. Last year’s Pregnancy and Parenting Support bill, dubbed the Heartbeat Protection Act by its supporters, was done so for good reason. At six weeks a fetus has a heartbeat. While commonly, and falsely, reported as a 6-week abortion ban (as there are exceptions for rape, incest, human trafficking and the health of the mother), seemingly lost somewhere along the way in the ever politically charged debate about the topic is one very important fact. The reason why Florida’s new abortion law was set at six weeks is because that’s when a fetus, aka a baby, has a heartbeat. Let’s strip away the particulars about law and whatever it is we’ve personally decided is acceptable, for whatever reason, and address this question. Should a fetus, with a heartbeat, be aborted? Because that’s the reality of the situation. One of my many sayings is that when it comes to many important topics once you know you can’t unknow. The atrocities of the Holocaust are a prominent example of once you know what happened you can’t unknow it, related and more recently, so too are the atrocities of the October 7th terrorists' attacks and yet college campuses across the country are running rampant with supporters of the terrorists who carried out those horrific attacks. I also believe that once you know there’s a baby with a heartbeat at six weeks you can’t unknow that information. Information is key and what I’ve found during the course of my 26-year career of researching, analyzing and disseminating information is that on some of the biggest issues that seemingly everyone has a strong opinion about, like abortion, many if not most don’t really know what they’re talking about. Consider this. In 2022 around the time of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, The Pew Reasearch Center extensively sampled the view of Americans on the issue of abortion. What they found was this. When people were asked if abortion should be legal or illegal in most instances (with some qualifiers to choose from) by a margin of 61% to 37% Americans said abortion should be legal in all/most cases. However, when the same panel was presented with a question worded a different way the result wasn’t the same. The question was this: As you may know, six weeks into a pregnancy is about when cardiac activity (sometimes called a fetal heartbeat) can be detected, and before many women know they are pregnant. Should abortion at that point be...(they were presented with different options). At that point only 44% said that abortions should still definitively be legal at six weeks or longer. That's an immediate shift of 17% with the only change appearing to be the wording of the question informing those taking the survey about a fetal heartbeat at six weeks. What’s more is that only 19% said abortion should be legal in all cases. That’s effectively a 42% shift to at least some extent once people are considering that there’s a heartbeat involved in this decision. As the debate about this issue plays out today, straight through Election Day, with the proposed constitutional abortion amendment which would allow for abortions past the Roe standard of 20 weeks – the question is this. Should a fetus with a heartbeat be aborted? If for you the answer is no, then Florida’s law that takes effect today is the right law for you and the next generation of Floridians. Speaking of which... 
2. The impact of the new law. It will be extensive. Most abortions take place between when what Florida’s law used to be, 15 weeks, and what it is today at six weeks. Right at 66%, or about two-thirds, of all abortions take place after six weeks. There were a total of 84,052 abortions which took place in Florida last year (about 230 per day). Based on what we know approximately 55,000 of them would have happened after six weeks. That is a significant impact with the new law in place to be sure. With that said, Florida’s new abortion law is far from the most restrictive. There are currently 14 states with stricter abortion limitations than Florida as of today. The question is whether it will remain that way after November’s elections.  
3. Mayday. May 1st has meant many different things to many different people throughout history. For some it’s been a spring festival with pretty flowers and maypoles. For other’s it’s brought about ritualistic pagan parties and more recently communists have claimed the day for “workers”. But there is a universal mayday, that one being a distress call. This May Day, the Federal Reserve will announce their policy decision pertaining to interest rates (which will be no change), but the key will be in what they have to say. The worst position the Federal Reserve can be in is one in which interest rates are already high (as they are) but with inflation accelerating (as it has been for the first three months of the year) and with the economy rapidly decelerating (which it also did for the first three months of the year). You can’t cut interest rates with inflation still high and accelerating without making the problem worse. You can’t raise interest rates with the economy decelerating without risking throwing the economy into a recession (which may happen anyway). But doing nothing isn’t proving to fix any problems either. What the Federal Reserve has to say at about 2:15 today will be key for the financial markets, for the economy and for all of us. They won’t be explicitly saying mayday, but what they say may imply it. They’re stuck between a rock and a hard place on their policy decisions. Just as all of us who live with public policy decisions effectively have been for three years.