Q&A of the Day – The Truth About Parental Consent w/Amendment 4
Each day I feature a listener question sent by one of these methods.
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Today’s Entry: I want to offer a scenario and see if your research would support this theory based on how Amendment 4 is written. This is disgusting and needs to be presented cautiously. If a young girl were being sexually abused by an adult male, maybe a family member, teacher/coach, neighbor … under the proposed new amendment, would it be true that the abuser could in fact pay for the abortion without parental approval and continue the abuse?
It seems this amendment was written for the benefit of abusers. Epstein is all that comes to mind here.
Bottom Line: It’s a great point and also an instructive question. It’s also an angle, the lack of parental consent for minors to have an abortion, should Amendment 4 pass – that Governor DeSantis and his administration, frequently has spoken to. DeSantis has often said that under Florida’s consent laws, a minor may not even be given a Tylenol, without parental consent, yet if this proposed amendment were to pass it would open the door to minors having abortions without parental consent. As it pertains to your specific question, about a perpetrator paying for potential abortions for minors, that’s also addressed by what is and isn’t said in the language of the amendment.
For almost all voters Amendment 4’s ballot summary is all they’ll ever see or know of the proposal. As is stated:
- No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider. This amendment does not change the Legislature’s constitutional authority to require notification to a parent or guardian before a minor has an abortion.
The full text states: Limiting government interference with abortion.— Except as provided in Article X, Section 22, no law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider. That’s the critical context for this question. Here’s what Article X, Section 22 states:
- Parental notice of termination of a minor's pregnancy.-- The legislature shall not limit or deny the privacy right guaranteed to a minor under the United States Constitution as interpreted by the United States Supreme Court. Notwithstanding a minor's right of privacy provided in Section 23 of Article I, the Legislature is authorized to require by general law for notification to a parent or guardian of a minor before the termination of the minor's pregnancy. The Legislature shall provide exceptions to such requirement for notification and shall create a process for judicial waiver of the notification.
The Devil is in the details here. The carefully and cleverly worded amendment allows for the existing law stating that parental notification must still take place, however it doesn’t state that there is parental consent that must be authorized. This is a distinction with a difference.
It is an overt lie by the backers of Amendment 4 to suggest that parental consent is unimpacted by this proposal. If they wanted parental consent to remain, they could and would have changed the language from “parental notification” to “parental consent”. Should this amendment pass, at best a parent with standing, meaning a parent of a minor who had an abortion without their consent, would then have to sue to attempt to get the courts to alter the legal distinction of Amendment 4 to achieve consent.
There are no legal restrictions regarding who pays for an abortion, thus under the example presented in today’s note it would be possible for a perpetrator to pay for an abortion of a minor they’d victimized (though in theory the parents would be made aware that the abortion was happening – even if not the circumstances of the pregnancy or who is paying for the abortion). As always there are two sides to stories and one side to facts, these are the facts.