Why is Ron DeSantis' Florida creating so many abortions?
Florida's government works hard to harass and stigmatize women who choose to end pregnancies. And yet, Florida's rate is 3rd among a U.S. states; and 1st, by far, among anti-abortion states. Why?
Florida’s Republican state government has tried very hard — through open cruelty and endless bureaucratic/legal headaches — to discourage and/or prevent Florida women and girls from medically ending their pregnancies.
Florida has failed in that effort just as miserably and abjectly as it did in privatizing the Jefferson County public schools.
While the number of abortions has dropped nationally, in Florida over the past three years the number has risen some 14 percent, according to reports provided by the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration, from about 70,000 in 2019 to early 80,000 last year.
That excerpt is from a truly outstanding piece of reporting from Politico.
Those 80,000 terminated pregnancies in free Florida come to 18.5 per 1000 women. Florida trails only New York (20.3) and Illinois (18.6, which is essentially tie) in the rate of women who choose to end pregnancy rather than give birth in their state.
(California and Maryland don’t have data for some reason; it would be interesting to see where they fall.)
New York and Illinois differ from Florida in that neither seeks to actively suppress or stigmatize or put a legal thumb on the scale against termination of pregnancy as basic health care.
Neither of those states has a GOP power establishment that indulges public officials like Sen. Kelli Stargel and Judge John Stargel in their efforts to deny women and girls control over their pregnancies — and then stigmatize and punish them for trying.
And yet, despite this pro-life coercion, no other “red state” fails so spectacularly to meaningfully prevent abortions as Florida. Only Georgia, among traditionally “red” states, is even within 1.5 rate points.
Florida’s sex-drenched government loudly claims to consider abortion bad; but its citizens, of all cultural and ethnic and political affiliations, ignore its fake moralizing.
Florida’s women vote with their bodies; and Ron DeSantis’ brutal Florida is producing brisk abortion inflation that will soon catch Illinois and maybe New York.
The cruelty, not the terminated pregnancy, is the point
As I really think about it, my core goal as a public figure and citizen may well be to build and sustain a society in which all women feel comfortable and secure giving birth.
That’s certainly not the Florida we live in today; nor is it the Florida John and Kelli Stargel or Ron DeSantis show any interest in developing. If I were running for governor, I would talk often about reducing Florida’s abortion rate without forcing women to risk their lives to give birth to their rapist’s fetus.
It’s true that the Stargels’ cruel activism has inflicted some intense directed pain on individual women and girls over the years. That recently led their daughter Hannah to publicly denounce Kelli as a lawmaker, person, and mother. She literally mentions Kelli’s still unconstitutional 15-week ban with no exception for rape in the first two sentences of her video.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Yet all this Stargel pain inflicted on vulnerable individual women and girls has done nothing to effectively stem the rising tide of abortion in Florida that they supposedly see as a tragedy.
Nothing.
They’ve been in public office and power, as a nepotistic couple, for roughly 20 years. They have nothing to show at any macro level on reducing pregnancy termination. Instead, it’s accelerating in the free state of Florida.
That’s what they got for their cruelty and family strife. I hope it was worth it.
I should say that I don’t think Kelli Stargel actually cares about fetuses or whether terminated pregnancies occur. I’ve always observed her to enjoy the individual acts of cruelty that her “power” enables, rather than pay any attention to the systemic outcomes for which she has policy responsibility. Her education policy nonsense illustrates that endlessly.
To borrow from Adam Serwer, I think cruelty is always the point with Kelli. Other people’s pain is how she finds community and worth, in my observation.
But let’s just say cruelty isn’t the point, for argument’s sake. Let’s pretend Kelli actually cares if fetuses live or die. If so, she should hang her head in shame because Florida’s rate of pregnancy termination shows that the Stargel approach — the vicious punitive approach — has not worked at all to “save babies” in the free red state of Florida.
Why is that?
Lousy men + lousy longtime economy = lots of terminated pregnancies
I see two big reasons:
Florida man: We are the state of Jeffrey Epstein’s sweet plea deal; Bob Kraft’s rub and tug; Rush Limbaugh’s viagra; Matt Gaetz’s dominance over congressmen; the most — and most serious — Capitol Lynch Mob dude arrests; lots of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers; and Donald Trump’s adopted home.
Sex with a Proud Boy or Donald Trump or some Jordan Peterson/Joe Rogan-worshiping Florida “monster” is much more likely to end in abortion than sex with a “lib” man raised to be kind, respectful, and responsible. There are plenty of good, decent men in Florida; but the state vision of manhood that Florida power models, celebrates, and demonstrates is … what it is.
Thus, “Florida Woman” must swim with an inordinate number of “Florida Man” sharks in a state built to empower them. The odds are not in her favor.
Florida’s terrible, insecure economy for people who lack inherited or imported capital: Relative to other states, Florida is a terrible place to be born — if you don’t inherit any capital. And it’s getting worse. This hilarious little DeSantis hype blurb, which I’ve annotated, is pretty clear about how little the governor cares about people born here without inherited capital. Note the emphasis on “domestic migration” and “foreign tourism” from the “build the wall” types.
I inherited capital in various forms; and I’m a well-paid remote knowledge worker who will likely, with any luck, pass down some capital. Thus, Florida works for me well enough to keep me here — because it’s home and the people I love are here.
But I laid out in two recent articles why many — if not most — native Floridians can’t afford Florida anymore. The longstanding and widening “wage gap” with the rest of the country and the growing unaffordability of housing and insurance are the chief culprits — along with terrible state government services like K-12 education.
And if Floridians can’t afford Florida for themselves, they certainly can’t afford parenting in Florida. That’s likely why we’re the champion “red state” of women who don’t want to give birth.
I suspect exactly zero self-described “pro-life” Floridians I know will ask themselves why.
80,000 vulnerable Florida women vs. the church of the AR-15
The Politico article quotes Florida officials saying its possible the 15-week ban becomes a total ban when Roe is struck down.
In that event, said State Sen. Kathleen Passidomo (R-Naples), who is slated to become the president of the Florida Senate next year, her chamber might consider a complete abortion ban.
“There’s always a chance; right now we have a Republican majority,” Passidomo said. “We give the opportunity for a bill to be heard in committees and then see what happens.”
To go from 80,000 to zero overnight would take a lot of state violence against women, expressed in various ways. All prohibition depends on violence.
I see Kelli Stargel (less clear about John) as part of a small, unpopular “Christian” power movement with the AR-15 as its true cross and forced birth of rapist babies as its most intense public ministry. This faction of our society is plenty happy to rule us all at the point of violence across every inch of our bodies and most intimate aspects of our human identities. Kelli would be down for a total ban enforced with violence.
But most people are far more normal — even the rest of Polk’s weak legislators. DeSantis is afraid to say what he would do. And that’s why I think we’re likely to stay at a 15-week ban. This is a consequential fight, involving real life and death; and a total ban is very unpopular, even with Florida Republicans. That’s not the kind of fight DeSantis likes to swagger into. Because he’s actually quite weak.
The 15-week ban will actually do nothing to slow the onslaught of women choosing not to give birth in DeSantis’ Florida.
It would not affect the overwhelming majority of abortions in Florida, about 94 percent of which last year took place before the 15th week of pregnancy.
It will, just with gratuitous cruelty, punish a rape or incest victim who doesn’t act quickly enough in the aftermath of trauma to seek a pregnancy termination.
That’s really Kelli Stargel in a nutshell: inflict pointless, useless individual brutality and cruelty she can enjoy while failing completely to legislate anything helpful in reducing Florida’s accelerating rate of terminating pregnancy.