Florida's own data shows it's lying about forced birth exceptions - and much more

"Health of the mother" abortions down 36% in 2024. Rape exceptions don't really exist. Legal "born alive" abortions *doubled* post-Roe. And is DeSantis looking to flip Charles Canady?

Take a look at these three charts I built from pregnancy termination data collected by Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA). You can access the source data here.

The last image above is how the yearly abortion data in my charts appears on the ACHA site. You can see it’s broken down by trimester, too.

In all three charts, I have extrapolated the 2024 data out to a full 12 months, rather than just mid-October. So this is an apples-to-apples time comparison.

Exception vs. reason

Important note: this data does not track “exceptions” to state mandated forced birth. It tracks the reason given for a legal abortion.

Under Roe v Wade, all pregnancy terminations were non-criminal through fetal “viability,” which generally occurs around 24 weeks, near the end of the second trimester. There was no need to verify an “exception.” Yet, women and doctors were apparently required to articulate a reason so the state could classify the type of pregnancy termination they sought.

Reasons are still required now, after 15-week and then 6-week forced birth became law in 2022 and 2024, respectively.

Former Sen. Kelli Stargel, R-Lakeland’s 15-week and current Rep. Jennifer Canady, R- Lakeland’s 6-week forced birth law created different, but equally incoherent “exception” structures. (I do apologize on behalf of Lakeland’s many decent people for our community inflicting these two horrible people and politicians on the rest of you. Some of us tried hard to prevent it. If their districts were just the city limits, it would probably be different.)

State exception law is an intentionally confusing and chaotic mess, which is totally indifferent to “life” or maternity care. But the state’s abortion classification structure is not. The classification structure is coherent and consistent going back years across all the different conflicting landscapes of Roe, 15-week, and 6-week forced birth.

That allows us to draw informed inferences about the impacts of the radical forced birth policies dishonestly imposed on an unwilling public by shameless liars like Stargel and Canady.

Let’s work through them.

*At least* 36 percent fewer interventions to protect a pregnant mother’s health under 6-week forced birth

The chart that follows break down the classifications of abortions given for pregnancy emergency/complication reasons. There are four big categories, each with its own official state name, which I shortened in the chart.

Note particularly the blue shaded area. Florida’s specific classification for the blue is “physical health of the mother that is not life-endangering.” In 2023, prior to 6-week forced birth, the state of Florida says there were 1,334 abortions performed to preserve the health of a mother. In 2024, that number projects out to 857. (The actual number, as of today, is 682.)

That’s a projected 36 percent decrease in medical interventions to protect health of the mother.

In threatening to arrest Florida TV station employees for running accurate Amendment 4 ads (like it should threaten me for my work), the state of Florida declared the following in a letter. Note the part in bold:

The Florida Department of Health has been notified that your company is disseminating a political advertisement claiming that current Florida law does not allow physicians to perform abortions necessary to preserve the lives and health of pregnant women. This claim is categorically false.

The state talks about “lives” and “health” as separate things. Thus, Florida’s statement here is, itself, obviously “categorically false.”

Doctors in Florida are now at least 36 percent less likely to “preserve” the “health of pregnant women” than they were before 6-week forced birth.

Something changed in how doctors and pregnant women interact between 2023 and 2024. It is quantifiable in the state’s own data. There are clearly abortions/treatments doctors are no longer performing to “preserve” the “health of pregnant women.”

We don’t know what they are because the state of Florida and the fake, dead “pro-life” movement doesn’t take its own fake beliefs seriously enough to tell us. And perhaps more damningly, hospitals refuse to tell us.

Waiting for cancer to metastasize from “health” to “life.”

I have covered my vain attempts to get detailed public itemization from anyone of what doctors can and cannot do to “preserve” the “health of pregnant women” — over and over and over again.

And I certainly will not forget the cowardice of highly paid hospital executives who pose for glamour spreads in magazines, but leave the pregnant women and loved ones who pay the massive CEO salaries to guess what to expect when they’re expecting. (“Up for the challenge.” LOL.)

But here is an illuminating, specific example of what is happening in Florida hospitals from a different reporter. It puts flesh on the lies Florida is telling that are also captured and revealed in the data I’m citing.

Note the part in bold. It’s what Jennifer Canady has inflicted on pregnant women with cancer.

In reality, the six-week ban has directly harmed women’s health, as documented in a recent report by Physicians for Human Rights. Doctors accused of providing an abortion too early, before the exception applies, face a five-year prison sentence. They are therefore reluctant to terminate, even to save a woman’s life. Instead, they seek approval from the hospital—which causes lengthy and often harmful delays. Physicians for Human Rights found that many doctors refer patients out of state for a medically necessary abortion to avoid the risk of investigation, prosecution, and incarceration if the state disagrees with their judgment.

The problem is especially acute for cancer patients, like Caroline, who must undergo an abortion in order to receive chemotherapy. Florida’s exception does not clarify when a patient’s cancer is severe enough to justify termination. [From Billy—that means “does not clarify when the “health” of the mother becomes the “life” of the mother.”] These women may have to wait until their tumor grows before a doctor will certify that it will cause “substantial and irreversible physical impairment.”

In fact, Physicians for Human Rights interviewed a Florida doctor whose patient needed an abortion so she could undergo chemotherapy for metastatic pancreatic cancer. The doctor worked with lawyers to compile the immense amount of paperwork necessary to prove that her patient qualified for an exception. It took so long that she ultimately urged the patient to drive four hours to terminate elsewhere. This denial of medical care is precisely what “Caroline” warns against.

Lengthy and harmful delays. Waiting for cancer to metastasize from “health” to “life” so doctors can act. Thanks, Jennifer Canady - and all you silent, fake “pro-lifers.”

More Florida third trimester abortions and “live birth abortions” *after* Roe than before

In an acute health emergency, prior to the fall of Roe, a woman could receive a vanishingly rare 3rd trimester abortion. She still can. That hasn’t changed.

But as you can see from the data and charts, under the last two full years of Roe, exactly zero of Florida’s 154,685 abortions occurred in the third trimester. Women. do. not. have. third. trimester. abortions — unless there is some dire dire dire incredibly rare and horribly sad reason.

Moreover, as you can see, Ron DeSantis oversaw a doubling of legal, post-Roe “live birth” abortions in Florida while he was lying about/condemning it in “blue” states. That stat is kept separate from the overall abortion data. This is all it says:

In “red” Florida, this legal “infant born alive” abortion happened a combined 32 times in 2022, 2023, and 2024, under the forced birth laws that Ron DeSantis, Kelli Stargel, and Jennifer Canady imposed on an unwilling public. In the last three years of Roe, there were only 14. This is according to Florida state government itself.

Government forced birth has already killed more American babies, driven more American abortions, and maimed/killed more American women than Roe; thus, it’s hardly surprising it correlates to more “live birth abortions,” too.

Forcing women to wait until death is beckoning tends to cause more radical life-saving measures, I suspect. I don’t fully understand the typical “infants born alive” scenario; so I don’t want to dive into it here. But I know DeSantis didn’t prosecute anybody for those 32 examples of post-Roe “infants born alive.”

So if you get all fired up about “post birth abortion,” which is almost certainly an excruciating emergency procedure in every case, you should vote for Amendment 4, which seeks to reinstate Roe.

Roe has a much “better” record on that than DeSantis and Jennifer Canady.

Texas had 26,000 rape pregnancies in 16 months; Florida reports *75* abortions because of rape in 2024. Only 11 are clearly “exceptions”

Florida’s rape pregnancy number is likely larger than Texas because we have traditionally produced far more abortions than Texas. But to my knowledge there is no rape pregnancy study for Florida comparable to the one in Texas.

The shocking mismatch in scale between rape pregnancies and rape abortions leads to an obvious conclusion about rape exceptions. Here’s an author of the study stating it:

Those exceptions provide no meaningful abortion care for survivors of rape and sexual assault, full stop.

There are no abortions happening for survivors of rape in states like Idaho that supposedly have exceptions for rape. But we know that, because of the extremely burdensome criteria for obtaining an abortion, not just on the survivor, but on the medical provider, that providers are essentially telling those survivors of rape that they need to travel out of state or find somewhere else to go or continue a pregnancy that was a result of sexual violence.

Remember, the state data I’m citing isn’t exceptions granted; it’s reasons given.

Up to six weeks, a pregnant woman or girl doesn’t need to get an exception. So far in 2024, there have only been 11 rape abortions performed in the second trimester. So those are the only 11 rape abortions we can know for certain are exceptions. The rest of the first trimester rape abortions could have come pre-6 weeks.

And even the tiny number of rape abortions is plunging under 6-week forced birth. Do you think that’s because there are fewer rape pregnancies? Or because rape victims are suddenly more eager to carry their rapist’s fetus?

“Relationship”-based rape pregnancies

You may ask yourself: can Texas really have 26,000 rape pregnancies in 16 months? Aren’t these abortionists just trying to stir people up?

If you conceive of rape only as a criminal stranger violently taking sex, sort of like this:

Trump: "Yeah that's her with the gold. I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful... I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything."

Bush: "Whatever you want."

Trump: "Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."

… then no, there are likely not anywhere close to 26,000 rape pregnancies.

However, the vast majority of rape/sexual assault is performed by someone the victim knows well. Abusive and violent relationships lead to rape pregnancies at massive scale. And there are Karl Malone pregnancies at massive scale — adults impregnating children with whom they’re in “relationships.” In Malone’s case, he impregnated a 13-year-girl when he was 20.

So now, thanks to Stargel and Canady and DeSantis, if you’re a pregnant 13-year-old or an isolated victim of domestic abuse and you miss your 6-week time window to get an exception-free abortion, you have to choose between the abortion or sending the abusive husband or 20-year old “boyfriend” to prison — if you can even prove it, which is famously difficult. And if you can’t send him to prison … well, it’s Florida, and he gets to keep his guns.

That brutal choice is almost certainly the same reason very few women gave “rape” as the reason for their abortions before the end of Roe.

Florida has “elective” and “social or economic reasons” categories for abortion. We’ll look at them in a future article. Unless you were very very determined to see your rapist prosecuted under Roe or under 15-week forced birth, it was much easier to cite “elective” or “social or economic reasons.”

Indeed, there was no exception for rape at all under Kelli Stargel’s 15-week forced birth law. A victim just had much more time to get an “elective” abortion than under Canady’s 6-week forced birth law.

Sheriff Judd — or anyone — *still* needs to publish a rape exception protocol

When you start to understand the “relationship”-based strands of rape pregnancy, the scale mismatch of rape pregnancy and rape abortion seems obvious.

Moreover, in 2024, there have been zero second trimester abortions for either human trafficking or incest. We cannot be certain that Florida has granted any exception for either of those reasons.

I wrote an article a while back urging mouthy Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd to end his silence on rape exceptions and explain the protocol for getting a rape exception (or human trafficking or incest.) He, of course, has not.

The article holds up. See it reposted below.

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DeSantis and Jennifer Canady think they’re losing on Amendment 4; will they flip Charles?

I don’t know if Amendment 4 will get to 60. Polls say it has a chance; but it’s hard to predict. I wouldn’t bet either way.

But I can see that DeSantis and Jennifer Canady think they’re losing on Amendment 4. Canady, like the weak GOP men she emulates, can’t take an L. That’s why she won’t acknowledge that Amendment 4 exists — or even bother to compete to defeat it.

I have four campaign mailers from Canady on my desk. They’ve all come in the past few weeks. Not a single mailer talks about her great accomplishment of imposing 6-week forced birth exception delays on pregnant women with cancer. Not a single mailer acknowledges Amendment 4 exists, much less makes a lame case for opposing it. Not a single mailer uses this picture of Canady casting adoration on the tiny dictator as he signed her 6-week forced birth bill.

What an abject public coward Jennifer Canady is from head to toe. Not even a remotely worthy opponent — morally or ideologically or intellectually.

She’s also attached at the hip to tiny dictator DeSantis and their cratering mutual henchman Anthony Pedicini. Together, DeSantis and Pedicini made Canady speaker designate in some theoretical future.

You can tell DeSantis think he’s losing Amendment 4, too — because he’s given up any half-hearted pretense of trying to persuade people that it’s good to impose lengthy forced birth exception delays on pregnant women with cancer. He’s retreated to the only thing he really knows — weak-ass dictator threats and raw coercion and fake investigations of fake fraud.

A federal judged slapped down the threatening letters to TV stations yesterday. So I probably won’t get my own letter. Sad. I really wanted to get arrested.

The more likely — and serious — threat to Amendment 4 is that nepo Jennifer Canady’s husband, Florida Supreme Court Justice Charles Canady, will flip his somewhat surprising swing vote from the spring that allowed Amendment 4 to exist.

I suspect that’s the purpose of DeSantis’ fake report on fake signature fraud (long past the legal window for challenging signatures) that DeSantis’ fake election police just produced.

It has already spawned a fake lawsuit, which is probably just a vehicle for getting Amendment 4’s existence back in front of Charles Canady so he can change his mind and flip on Amendment 4 — so his wife and DeSantis don’t have to take an L.

Would Charles Canady do that? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I hope calling it before it happens makes it less likely.

In any event, do you think Jennifer and Charles and Ron DeSantis chat about Charles’ all important vote?

Or do you believe they’ve put scrupulous moral walls up to prevent any moral and ethical conflicts? LOL.

If you believe that, you probably also believe Florida doctors are totally allowed to protect the health of pregnant mothers; you probably believe rape exceptions functionally exist; and you probably believe Ron DeSantis or Jennifer Canady care about life.