Florida's conservative chief justice once affirmed abortion protections

[TeamProg]

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a strict abortion ban hours after it overwhelmingly passed the Republican-led legislature this month — yet whether the law can take effect hinges on a case before the state Supreme Court.

At issue is a provision in the Florida Constitution intended to protect the right to privacy, added by voters decades ago and long interpreted as a safeguard against abortion restrictions in the third-most-populous state.

But while the state’s high court has been transformed by DeSantis into a conservative stronghold, even the chief justice — whose nomination was cheered by antiabortion activists — has acknowledged that the privacy clause protects abortion.

A paragraph in a little-noticed 2004 article by Carlos Muñiz, then a private attorney and now chief justice, is being cited by abortion rights advocates in the case before the high court that will ultimately decide the fate of abortion access in the state.

“One purpose of the privacy amendment clearly was to give the abortion right a textual foundation in our state constitution,” Muñiz wrote in the article for the Journal of the James Madison Institute.

Olivia Cappello, a spokeswoman for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, a nationwide umbrella group, declined to comment on Muñiz’s article but said the facts of the law are clear.

“Florida’s constitution contains strong protections for the right to medical privacy,” she said in a statement. “Those protections extend to abortion, as many legal scholars — including the author of this law review article — have acknowledged.”

[link:https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/04/27/florida-supreme-court-privacy-clause-muniz/|