Gabrielle Russon
The woman, known only as Caroline, who was thrust into a First Amendment legal fight with the state over a pro-abortion rights political ad spoke to reporters Friday.
Caroline, who doesn’t want to be identified by her last name, shared her story about having an abortion in 2022 during her second trimester after she was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer.
“When I was 18 weeks pregnant, I started having symptoms where I wasn’t able to speak, write, focus, and I couldn’t read. It happened so fast, like over six days, and I thought maybe I was having a stroke,” Carolina said during an Amendment 4 media call. “After getting progressively worse, I went to the emergency room, and that is where they found a large mass in my brain.”
Doctors wanted her to start chemotherapy and radiation right away to extend her life.
“All I wanted to do was leave the Neuro-ICU and go home to my almost 2-year-old girl,” Caroline said. “It was the hardest decision that I have ever made in my life, but I chose to end my pregnancy and prepare for radiation that next day. My abortion allowed me more time to be a mother to my daughter and a wife to my husband.”
Caroline, now a reproductive freedom advocate, was featured in an Amendment 4 commercial for the abortion rights initiative on the Nov. 5 ballot — an ad the Department of Health (DOH) sought to get pulled off the airways.
A then-DOH attorney sent cease and desist letters to Florida TV stations, threatening them with criminal prosecution if they continued to play the ad.
Caroline said she received compassionate messages of support after her emotional commercial began playing, but was packing up to evacuate from Hurricane Milton in Tampa when she learned about the state’s cease and desist letters.
“It stung a bit because it surprised me,” Caroline said. “I was surprised because in my community, my neighborhood, it was all support and love.”
The state argued the Caroline ad is misleading and Florida’s six-week ban makes an exception for pregnant women to get abortions beyond six weeks to save their lives.
Floridians Protecting Freedom, the political committee behind Amendment 4, stands by the ad and says people in Caroline’s situation today would not get access to the medical care they needed since the abortion only would extend their lives, not save it, since Caroline’s cancer is terminal.
A federal Judge granted a temporary restraining order Thursday to prevent the state from threatening TV stations further.
“To keep it simple for the State of Florida: it’s the First Amendment, stupid,” U.S. District Judge Mark Walker wrote in his 17-page order.
WINK-TV, a CBS affiliate in Fort Myers, stopped playing the ads but has resumed them again, according to Floridians Protecting Freedom, the political committee behind Amendment 4 that sued two Florida officials for First Amendment violations.
2 comments
Billy Rotberg
October 18, 2024 at 4:49 pm
Abortion is a great way to reduce population. Have at it. But then again there are plenty of birth control methods which would eliminate the whole issue if some people weren’t that lazy.
Sue
October 18, 2024 at 5:52 pm
It’s not used as birth control in the way you are thinking. It may occasionally but to have an abortion in the 4 month and beyond it mostly from women as this one in the ad. She wanted more time with her 2 yr old daughter as this woman’s cancer is terminal. An abortion for her, as the law goes, wouldn’t be allowed because it wouldn’t “save the life” of the mother. Another reason woman have late term abortions is because the fetus has died and the pregnancy is no longer viable. The woman’s life is still not in danger. The last argument is when a woman finds out there is total devastation of a fetus with birth defects that would hinder the fetus from having any normalcy to life or will die soon after birth (fetuses who’s brains hasn’t developed) and the eventual baby with be a vegetable for life or may die soon after birth. Sometimes in a grossly suffering manner. Women want to terminate to keep fetus from suffering or have a child that would not have any quality of life and would use up any and all resources just to keep child alive. That itself cruel and abusive.