Ron DeSantis, Florida's most prolific abortionist
Florida ranks 3rd in abortion, 41st in birth rate, and 2nd with a bullet in oldness. Our state is not socially or economically "dynamic"; it's in decline, especially for the young.
Florida women and girls make great effort to avoid getting pregnant and giving birth. They vote with their bodies on the future of Florida.
Florida ranks 41st in birth rate, right down there with #43 West Virginia, which is in population collapse. And 21.3 percent of Florida residents are 65 or older, second only to Maine at 21.8. Florida is a full percentage point higher than the last Census.
At the same time, Florida has as an astronomical and growing abortion rate — by far the highest of any state where political power is hostile to abortion as a right. We’re third overall in the country, despite actively trying to stop, shame, and harass women and girls who seek them.
To repeat: 3rd in abortion rate, 41st in birth rate. Second-oldest state, only slightly behind Maine and just ahead of West Virginia. And we’re getting older fast because that’s who owns the capital we need to import and spend down to drive Old Florida’s economy of depletion.
Florida is the greatest state failure, without question, of the forced birth movement
The forced birth movement directs massive state-sponsored humiliation and coercion at Florida women who terminate pregnancies. And yet, those women — 80,000 per year and growing — endure it all.
That’s how little Florida Woman wants to risk her life to carry a Florida Man’s fetus and give birth to Florida Man’s child in this aging, gunsick, expensive, low-wage, imported capital-dependent state.
Think about that. What an abject and total failure of the fake “pro-life” movement.
If I believed human life “begins at conception,” like so many Florida politicians and fake Christians and Herschel Walker claim to pretend to believe, I would hang my head in total moral shame. But I am not them; and they are not me. They do not self-reflect or feel shame.
This failure should feel particularly acute for Ron DeSantis, if he were capable of feeling anything.
Charlie Crist and even Rick Scott oversaw some downward movement in Florida’s high abortion rate. DeSantis has spiked it since his election in 2018. Women end at least 8,000 more pregnancies per year than they did when DeSantis took office.
I would bet no individual abortion doctor in Florida comes close to ending so many pregnancies in a year. Florida’s abortion inflation far predates COVID.
Insurance up + rent up + relative wages down + no health care support + politics dominated by the old = surging Florida abortion rate
Yes, yes, correlation is not causation. I know.
And of course, the brutal generational jihad to dominate a woman’s body, give her rapist pro-creation rights over her, and make her a vessel for forced birth is known for its nuance and measured thoughtfulness.
So maybe I should try to match its moral and intellectual good faith with a measured, data-driven hypothesis for Florida’s surging abortion rate. Here it is:
Florida is a cruel, stressful, and expensive place for any mother without capital to bear and raise a child. It’s getting more expensive; decent access to public capital — such as maternity care and fully-staffed, full-service public education — is diminishing; and Florida’s wages, relative to the country, have been tanking for years.
If you want to understand why, from an economic and personal stress point-of-view, Florida women would turn to the physical and economic safety of refusing to give birth, look at these images together and then read the two articles that follow.
As I wrote in the first article below: “Florida: very, very old; very very low wage; and now very expensive”
And that’s before you even get to how shitty gunsick Florida Man is and how unwilling to pay his child support while listening to Jordan Peterson tell him he’s the victim.
The comically vapid new University of Florida president thinks all this demonstrates that Florida has “the most dynamic economy in the union.” LOL, that explains quite a bit about the mediocrity of the U.S. Senate.
Child birth 500% deadlier than murder; 1400% deadlier than abortion
Moreover, Florida’s maternal death rate in child birth spiked to a 20-year high in 2019 — with a rate of 28.6 dead women per 100,000 live births. The national rate was 20.
Florida claims our rate dropped to 13.4 in 2020. I have doubts, given all COVID reporting shenanigans that happened in 2020. And my Polk County’s weird, giant fluctuations must relate to the relatively small number per 100,000 measure. All the data seems a little hinky. But it’s also “official” state data.
Assuming these state numbers are right, let’s do a comparison: Florida’s homicide rate is about 6 dead per 100,000 population. Women have a much higher likelihood of dying in child birth than they have of being murdered. In 2019, it was 500 percent higher in Florida.
When’s the last time you heard any politician talk about it — much less run an ad about it? Ever?
Indeed, the forces of Florida capital, political, and religious power have only one response to this reality context that all pregnant women and girls face:
Well, we’re gonna put a gun to your head; and you can just risk your life to give birth and turn your child over to somebody with capital to raise it. That sounds fun, right?
Good luck with that …
Especially when a woman is 1400 percent more likely to die from child birth than from legally terminating a pregnancy. See this study.
Young Florida needs representation and support — or Elderly Florida is doomed first
Take a look at how this image of Florida’s median county age. Note the white and blue swath of young counties right in the middle on the Central Florida I-4 Corridor. That biggest white county in the middle is Polk County — where I live.
Now check how age aligns to county voting in the 2020 presidential election.
Every single county that voted “blue” is median age younger than 44, with one exception: the very urban Pinellas County which is median age 45-54 — and it was very close there. And I’ve already documented how Polk, my young county, surged to the “left” and away from the GOP in the August 2022 primary.
The entire I-4 Corridor — Florida’s youngest, most vibrant concentration of population and developmental energy — could be reliably “blue” in 10 years, if that’s still a thing.
But Young Florida’s political power base won’t be enough to change the trajectory of a state dominated by a selfish voting bloc dictatorship of the high-capital, northern immigrant Old Florida. (Obviously, not all high-capital, elderly immigrants are indifferent to the future. My deepest respect for those of you who care about leaving behind a decent future, no matter where you were born.)
It’s easy to slag off on Democrats, who are not very good at electoral politics in Florida. But I’m not sure any party that tries to talk about a future for young people can cut through our state’s current demographic reality in any given election. The wall of Old Florida is politically impregnable for now, I suspect. And it’s so easy to make it jump with: “they want to turn boys into girls,” or other nonsense like that.
Until the abortion rate and the birth rate and the lack of employees and the rising costs of manufactured paradise truly cut into the immigrant retiree’s actual experience of depleting their inherited capital or pensions, all those red places will keep lurching toward their own childless doom and taking what’s left of our young people with them. There’s a “Children of Men” vibe (the book, not the movie) to much of Florida.
The hope of Young Florida
One does see hints of that experience-erosion process beginning to happen. Places like the Villages have slowed in growth. Miami-Dade lost population, mostly among the young in 2020, according to the Census. Mostly, Florida has gotten really expensive.
My county, Polk, and Lee County, which was ground zero for Ian, were the two fastest growing counties in Florida (top 10 in America) before the storm. They represent two very different realities of Florida — young, diverse, and inland vs. old, white, and coastal. Which has a stronger foundation for a future?
Polk’s growth continues to surge; we’ll see how Lee recovers.
Indeed, we on the I-4 Corridor — especially the inland part — are best positioned to survive any collapse of imported capital and old people. We are the future of Florida, if it has one. If our Young Florida was a state, what a different state we would be.
Moreover, my family, my capital, my community, my home is here, in Lakeland, in Polk County, in Young Florida. I love it here enough not to willingly surrender it to people who don’t care that Florida is a bad place to give birth.
But for now, Young Florida is nowhere near state power.
I was reminded of that last weekend when I stumbled upon an “Abortion kills swimming star” headline in a 1954 edition of the Lakeland Ledger I was reading in microfilm. In my 50 years of life, I had never before seen such a headline because abortion has been safe and legal.
We’ll start seeing those headlines again soon. We’ve already seen multiple incest and rape horror stories of women denied abortions. The death will follow.
Old Florida power longs for grandchildren and a past that produced “abortion kills” headlines — at the same time. I don’t think it can have both.
It will need to pick one or the other — because killing pregnant Florida women with greater regularity won’t do anything to lift Florida’s birth rate or make us younger.
A tiny, inconsequential emperor; a very consequential abortionist
When you hear me talk about how thoroughly inconsequential Ron DeSantis is, I’m talking about these fundamental civic and economic dynamics, which define Florida far, far more than any election or political reality.
Ron DeSantis has proven really good at two small, selfish, and related political skills: scapegoating vulnerable Floridians and emasculating GOP “leaders.”
That’s how he so easily converted Florida’s one-party political structure into a weak personal dictatorship that renders every other individual Republican meaningless, especially those like Jeff Brandes, who occasionally have thoughts about a future.
As is true for most resource extraction economies, private interests and structures have long “governed” Florida far more than state or local government does, for better and mostly worse.
DeSantis really just made himself tiny emperor of Florida’s aging public ashes. And he figured out how to collect personal political rent from the private interests who strip-mine all that aged imported capital to which our state is fully addicted.
In doing so, DeSantis has destroyed any pretense of GOP and court independence and channeled all state government’s political spoils — at all levels — through his personal operation for his personal benefit. He’s shown how easy it is to seize dignity from his supporters. There is not one Republican elected official in state government — other than DeSantis — who matters or is worth talking to about policy they can’t implement.
Yet, by doing absolutely nothing to affect the “run to destruction + deplete imported capital” trajectory he inherited from Rick Scott, Ron DeSantis has had a very consequential effect on the trajectory of the abortion rate.
I assume that’s unintentional.
But it’s still a visceral and meaningful indicator of his performance on his party’s own terms. Women do not want to give birth here.
That’s a more fundamental referendum on his leadership than any election.
Do Florida abortion stats differentiate in-state vs. out-of-state? Do we know how many are abortions are performed on women from Alabama, for instance?