Florida Legislature introduces series of pro-life bills

Pro-life Florida lawmakers are introducing a series of new measures to protect preborn lives and women’s health in the state.

The bills would prohibit Medicaid payments to any facility that provides abortions, ban the use of tissue from aborted babies in medical research, and require abortionists to have local hospital admitting privileges.

“These bills do nothing but make abortion safer, rarer and still legal,” the Florida Family Policy Council’s John Stemberger said. “Rarer is something most people want to see on a bipartisan basis.”

Republican state Rep. Mike Hall argued they would help prevent “a Kermit Gosnell situation here” in Florida. Gosnell’s crimes continued in part because the National Abortion Federation failed to report his facility’s safety and health violations to the authorities.

Abortion defenders call the bills medically-unnecessary attempts to force abortion facilities to close, but in 2003, a group of 32 medical organizations, including the pro-abortion American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, signed a statement affirming that such admitting privileges are a necessity for any “office-based surgery.”