Andrew MeachamIn a way, it is fitting that Kelli Stargel’s decade in the Senate culminated with consequential legislation, putting Florida back into the national conversation that will shape the country’s direction.
House Bill 5, which caps a woman’s right to an abortion at 15 weeks, passed in the Session’s closing days and is expected to go into law July 1 after Gov. Ron DeSantis signs it.
Stargel sponsored the bill, the strictest abortion legislation in the state’s history that echoes GOP proposals in Texas and Mississippi. In addition to making abortion illegal after 15 weeks, as does Mississippi’s bill, it makes no exceptions for rape, incest or human trafficking. The Mississippi legislation is now before the U.S. Supreme Court, a signal of the stakes for either side of the abortion debate.
Stargel, whose reconfigured Senate District 22 nestles in the center of the state between Brandon and Orlando, began her political career in the House in 2008. Her husband, John K. Stargel, had formerly represented that district. And Kelli Stargel fought off voices questioning her credentials to serve, some of them from voters and some in her own head.
Until then, she had taken the greatest satisfaction in being a mother, a job she didn’t foresee being interrupted. She planned one daughter’s wedding between the primary and the general election. The pain of separation hit hardest after she won when another daughter and a son were injured in a car crash.
“As a mom, I had always been there,” Stargel told her colleagues. “But I couldn’t be there. I was in Tallahassee, and it was clear that this was going to be the new normal for our family.”
John Stargel, a lawyer now an appeals court judge, backed her. But she still feared public speaking and wondered how her course credits at Tallahassee Community College compared with all the lawyers she would be arguing bills with.
So she studied everything, dissecting bills as she held a growing number of committee assignments, including chairing the Budget Committee for the past several years.
“Kelli didn’t go to law school, but she’s the best lawyer in this chamber,” said Senate Majority Leader Kathleen Passidomo, a veteran lawyer. “In the last couple of weeks alone, we’ve had philosophical conversations about the most mundane public records exemption to bills with heart-wrenching consequences, such as the alimony bill. Kelli has taken the time to sit down with me and go over every piece, section by section.”
Stargel lost the nagging self-doubt to such an extent it is now hard to believe it ever existed. Her life experience, far from coming up short, proved to be her greatest asset.
“What I soon realized,” Stargel said, “was that the many things I’m most passionate about could be better addressed, and sometimes better explained, by a mom.”
HB 5 dragged on for a month before heading to the desk of Gov. DeSantis, who supports it. Arguments rang with conviction on either side. Democratic Sen. Lauren Book, who has survived rape, cited that experience as she implored the bill’s backers to restore the exemptions. Stargel pointed to the moment an infant can be clearly detected on a sonogram, and she thanked God when the bill passed.
Those kinds of tensions did not surface in Stargel’s farewell gathering. Instead, warm words carried the day, the most fulsome from Stargel herself.
“This has been the time of my life,” she said.
