A TV station stopped playing pro-abortion rights ads after state’s threats, lawsuit says

Image via Florida Freedom Fund.

One Fort Myers TV station acquiesced and stopped playing pro-abortion rights ads after a Department of Health (DOH) lawyer threatened Florida TV stations with criminal prosecution.

It’s a revelation in a new First Amendment lawsuit as the political committee supporting the Amendment 4 abortion rights initiative sued a pair of state officials Wednesday in federal court.

Floridians Protecting Freedom (FPF) is currently negotiating with CBS affiliate WINK-TV to get the ads back on air, but representatives for the PC say it has lost valuable time to reach voters in that market with the election just three weeks away.

FPF is suing Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who is also the head of DOH, and John Wilson, the Department’s former General Counsel who wrote the letters, in the U.S. District Court’s Tallahassee Division.  

“The State’s threatened sanctions against third-party media organizations that host the advertisement — in a heavy-handed effort to silence FPF’s speech — is a classic and deeply disturbing example of unconstitutional coercion,” the lawsuit said.  “Defendants’ threat is an escalation of a broader State campaign to attack Amendment 4 using public resources and government authority to advance the State’s preferred characterization of its anti-abortion laws as the ‘truth’ and denigrate opposing viewpoints as ‘lies.’”

The lawsuit is asking the federal courts for an injunction to stop the state from threatening or intimidating more TV stations over the ads, aimed at supporting a ballot measure that would protect abortion rights in Florida’s Constitution and overturn the state’s current six-week abortion ban. FPF is also asking for compensatory and punitive damages as well as attorneys fees.

The ad at the heart of the controversy is about a Tampa woman who found out she was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer when she was 20 weeks pregnant with her second child. Before Florida’s current abortion law, she was able to get an abortion to get chemotherapy that extended her life for her family.

“Florida has now banned abortion even in cases like mine. Amendment 4 is going to protect women like me. We have to vote ‘yes,’” the woman identified as Caroline says in the ad.

But in his cease and desist letters to Florida TV stations, Wilson argued, “The advertisement is not only false; it is dangerous. Women faced with pregnancy complications posing a serious risk of death or substantial and irreversible physical impairment may and should seek medical treatment in Florida.”

He wrote that TV stations playing the ad were violating sanitary nuisance laws that were punishable as a second-degree misdemeanor.

FPF’s lawsuit countered that examples of health sanitary nuisances are things like garbage and dead animals  — not “political advertising that contradicts state officials’ political beliefs.”

Wilson’s Oct. 3 letters caused the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair to issue a reprimand.

“The right of broadcasters to speak freely is rooted in the First Amendment,” FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement. “Threats against broadcast stations for airing content that conflicts with the government’s views are dangerous and undermine the fundamental principle of free speech.”

Wilson left DOH a short time later, according to the Miami Herald, which reported that the reason for his departure was unclear.

FPF also stood by the Caroline ad and called it an accurate depiction of the state’s abortion law.

“Suffice to say, FPF disagrees with the State of Florida’s narrative about its current law, which bans most abortions after six weeks’ gestation,” the lawsuit said. “FPF sponsored Amendment 4 precisely because current Florida law does not protect women and instead runs roughshod over their rights and imperils their health by substituting the government’s judgments for those of women and their healthcare providers.”

FPF plans to keep running more ads, the lawsuit added.