Florida attorney general, against criticism, seeks to keep abortion rights amendment off 2024 ballot

Florida’s Republican attorney general has asked the state Supreme Court to keep a proposed abortion rights amendment off the ballot, saying proponents are waging "a war" to protect the procedure and ultimately will seek to expand those rights in future years.

But proponents of the proposed amendment said Attorney General Ashley Moody is playing politics and that her arguments fall legally short given what the call the clear and precise language of the proposed measure.

A group called Floridians Protecting Freedom has gathered nearly 500,000 of the 891,523 voter signatures needed ahead of a Feb. 1 deadline for signatures to put the proposal on the 2024 ballot. The state Supreme Court would be tasked with ensuring the ballot language isn’t misleading and applies to a single subject if it goes before voters.

The proposed amendment would allow abortions to remain legal until the fetus is viable. But Moody argued that abortion rights proponents and opponents have differing interpretations as to what viability means. Those differences along with the failure to define "health" and "health-care provider," she said, are enough to deceive voters and potentially open a box of legal questions in the future.

READ: Florida Supreme Court weighing state’s new abortion restrictions

"The ballot summary here is part of a ... design to lay ticking time bombs that will enable abortion proponents later to argue that the amendment has a much broader meaning than voters would ever have thought," she argued in a 50-page brief.

She said while prior court decisions have used viability as a term meaning whether the fetus can survive outside the womb, "others will understand ‘viability’ in the more traditional clinical sense — as referring to a pregnancy that, but for an abortion or other misfortune, will result in the child’s live birth."

Proponents disputed those statements.

"The proposed amendment is very clear and precise," Democratic state Rep. Anna Eskamani said in a news release. "The term viability is a medical one, and in the context of abortion has always meant the stage of fetal development when the life of a fetus is sustainable outside the womb through standard medical measures."