This story was written by Teen Vogue's 2024 Student Correspondents, a team of college students and recent graduates covering the election cycle from key battleground states.
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“It’s the First Amendment, stupid.”
These were the words of a federal judge who ordered the Florida Department of Health to stop threatening television stations over a particular pro-abortion advertisement. The commercial, created by the Yes on 4 campaign, references the upcoming Florida ballot measure known as Amendment 4 that would overturn the state’s strict abortion ban, and it features a woman from Tampa named Caroline. Caroline was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer two years ago while pregnant and, she says in the ad, would have been denied a potentially life-saving abortion had the ban been law at the time.
The ad makes the case for abortions as medical care, emphasizing that without the procedure, Caroline and her unborn child would have died — also leaving Caroline's firstborn daughter without a mother. In response to the ad, a Florida Department of Health (DOH) official — allegedly at the direction of Governor Ron DeSantis’s administration — sent cease-and-desist letters to TV stations statewide, threatening them with criminal charges if they continued to run it. One CBS station in Fort Myers buckled under the pressure, according to Florida Politics, though it has reportedly put the ad back on the air.
The official who sent the letters, Florida's DOH general counsel John Wilson, has since resigned. But the DeSantis administration has hit back against the federal judge’s ruling on the letters, arguing that the ad “is spreading false factual information” because the six-week law includes exceptions when the pregnant person’s life is at risk.
Another contentious point in Florida’s fight over abortion access includes parental consent requirements for minors seeking the procedure. Some ads running on Florida televisions today claim that Amendment 4 would leave parents out of the conversation if their pregnant teen were to seek an abortion in the Sunshine State. In reality, though, Amendment 4 would not reverse current Florida law requiring parental consent; but the amendment could open the door to legal challenges against the consent law, which would put the legislation's fate in the hands of the courts, according to PolitiFact.
To sort through the growing tensions and misinformation on this issue, Teen Vogue spoke with Lauren Brenzel, the campaign director of Yes on 4. During the interview, we asked Brenzel about the arduous journey of getting Amendment 4 on the ballot for voters — which included a lengthy, statewide petition process — and what young people in Florida and across the country should learn from the state’s attempts to censor the campaign.
This conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Teen Vogue: A central claim for many conservatives and pro-life voters is that they want abortion to be a states' rights issue. What has this process shown you in terms of the difficulty of that process in Florida vs. when abortion was federally protected?
Lauren Brenzel: It has been an incredibly challenging road from day one of this issue. The reality is that politicians seem most comfortable with states' rights when it’s them controlling the process and not the people having a say in their constitution. We've seen numerous attempts by our government to try to silence the will of the people, and now it is so important that everybody turns out and votes for this — because the only power we have is getting to that 60% [vote] threshold [needed to pass the constitutional amendment].
TV: The DeSantis administration was told by a federal judge to stop threatening television stations in Florida about Yes on 4’s ad. Florida Democrats also filed criminal complaints against the state after Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration ran an ad directing viewers to a website that makes a case against Amendment 4. What is your reaction to all of this?
LB: This is all trying to silence patients who have had abortions, and that's a really disturbing precedent being set. We have to hear from people who are impacted by abortion. We can't trust our politicians to continue to be the voice on this issue; patients and providers should be the voice. We know that the government isn’t ready to hear abortion stories because that's what wins the hearts and minds of people. Ultimately, regular people think of abortion as health care, not a political issue.
We've really been trying not to get distracted and continue to focus on the main message, which is that we need to pass Amendment 4 because there is no other way to end Florida's extreme abortion ban [in the near future]…. We won [a favorable ruling in] a federal lawsuit that was led with the ACLU of Florida and other attorneys to stop the Department of Health from trying to threaten criminal [charges] on television stations for running the Caroline ad….
But our main focus is in making sure we continue to share accurate information about Florida's abortion ban and just how horrible it is. That includes sharing stories from women like Anya Cook, who is from South Florida and lost half of the blood in her body because she was denied access to an abortion.… It's only a matter of time before we see a woman die in Florida because of a lack of medical care.
TV: Many people campaigning against Amendment 4 argue and are even running commercials that claim parents with teens who get abortions will not have any consent in the matter. Can you clear up misinformation about this, and explain what voting yes to Amendment 4 will mean for teens in Florida overall?
LB: It’s disheartening to see people believing the lies that our opposition tell.… We can't keep believing anti-abortion activists and their lies. Their main purpose and their main goal is to ban abortion in every state in the nation….
Parental notification is already protected in Florida's constitution. For our initiative, we made it very clear that we weren't trying to repeal that part of the constitution. There's no reason to believe this initiative would automatically erase parental consent. The Florida Legislature is in charge of figuring out how this initiative is going to be implemented, and the idea that our current legislature as it stands would repeal parental consent is laughable, given the composition of our state's legislature.
What the focus of this initiative is repealing is Florida's six-week abortion ban. These politicians know that, but they're willing to lie to voters to protect their abortion ban.
TV: What are some other points you think young people nationwide should take from Florida’s contentious fight over abortion?
LB: It's easy for people to feel really disaffected by politics right now. The reality is that a vote is one tool in our toolbox. Voting doesn't mean you can't perform other kinds of activism. It doesn't mean you can't get involved with things like mutual aid groups, and it doesn’t mean you can't protest your government. It doesn’t mean any of that — it is one tool in our toolbox, and it is five seconds of your day.
We have to get out there and vote because if we can't take that tool in our toolbox, the opposition certainly will take it and utilize it to their legal advantage — while they continue to use other tools in their toolbox, like silencing our voice, using taxpayer dollars to try to ban abortion, and criminally threatening our free speech.
We have to — we just have to take the time to do it — and not think of it as the end-all-be-all, but simply as part of a strategy to make our voices heard.
TV: Anything else you'd like to mention?
LB: It is critical that folks understand just how harmful Florida’s abortion ban is. We are the third largest state in the nation. You can look at a state like Texas to see how harmful an abortion ban is, because they're the second largest state in the nation. There has been a huge increase in [infant] mortality in that state.
We anticipate a pretty similar outcome in Florida, with the caveat that we are a state entirely surrounded by water, and we are farther from states that do not have abortion bans on the books. We are putting people in a really dangerous circumstance by having this abortion ban last past this November.
It is so rare that everyday people get the opportunity to undo an abortion ban.… We have the opportunity here to make a systemic change in this moment, and we have to do everything we can to win.
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