While Florida's economy in 2011 has at best stayed in neutral, leading to complaints from Democrats (and some Republicans) about a lack of focusing on job creation, the GOP-led Legislature was busy passing four different bills regarding abortion earlier this year. That was out of 18 proposed at the beginning of the session.
Next month in Mississippi, voters will go to the polls and decide on Amendment 26, the Personhood Amendment, which defines persons in the constitution's Bill of Rights as including "every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof."
For many pro-life supporters, the hope remains of reversing the 1973 Roe v. Wade U.S. Supreme Court decision by changing the composition of the high court.
But Representative Van Zant doesn't have the patience to wait.
"It’s simply not illegal to have an abortion, that’s the problem," he says "It’s not unconstitutional. There’s nothing in the Constitution that gives the mother the right to murder their unborn child.
Or a doctor. This is a scam on the American public by abortionists and by the population control movement. Eugenics and others who are out there from gosh, since the Civil War, I mean we’ve seen it over and over and over for decades and decades, and we have the abortion movement in our nation that is no more than the population control mechanism of the fed govt. because they fund them and support them."
Wendy Sears Grassi, Director of Public Affairs for Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida, told CL in an e-mail earlier this month that though Van Zant hadn't filed any legislation yet, there already are two anti-choice bills filed for next year's session, including SB 290 by Senator Anitere Flores from Miami, which is an omnibus bill that includes a dozen restrictions on clinics. "We wish the Florida Legislature would stop the relentless attacks on women’s health and work toward commonsense, compassionate solutions that will help create stronger, healthier families," she wrote.
Although he's been unsuccessful in pushing it the past couple of years in an extremely conservative state Legislature, Florida House Republican Charles Van Zant says he will once again soon introduce a bill that would make abortion illegal in the state of Florida, with the only exception being for the life of the mother.
Though not yet introduced, Van Zant told CL earlier this month that he will bring back the Florida for Life Act before the official session begins in Tallahassee in January. The lawmaker from Keystone Heights says if his bill were to pass, doctors would go to jail for performing an abortion.
“Absolutely. That would be a murder," he said in phone conversation. "He would be involved in the death of the lives of an infant child and certainly there would be penalties.”
