Providers trying again to get abortion ban before the FL Supreme Court

Abortion providers have filed notice that they plan to ask the Florida Supreme Court to wrest their appeal against Florida’s 15-week abortion ban from an intermediate appeals court and decide the case directly.

They said so in a document filed Wednesday in the First District Court of Appeal, which earlier rejected a request to send the case directly to Florida’s highest court. The plan is to file that appeal within 10 days.

“The decision is within the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction because it expressly and directly conflicts with a decision of the Supreme Court on the same question of law,” attorneys for Planned Parenthood Florida chapters and other providers said in the document.

That would be In re T.W., the Supreme Court’s 1989 precedent finding an expansive right to abortion within the Florida Constitution’s privacy clause. A state trial judge cited that case in blocking enforcement of the ban on July 5, four days after it took effect, but the state appealed that judgment.

“The [First District] court’s decision to ignore the harm this ban is causing to people in Florida today is as unconscionable as it is legally unprecedented,” Whitney White, a staff attorney with the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project,” said in a press release.

“The Florida Supreme Court has reaffirmed Floridians’ right to abortion time and time again, and nothing about the law has changed since politicians overreached in their pursuit to take away reproductive health care. We hope the court honors its prior precedents and takes up our request to put an end to the nightmare patients in Florida have suffered through for over a month.”

The ACLU is litigating on behalf of the providers along with the Center for Reproductive Rights, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and the law firm Jenner & Block.