Islamic State takes credit: Yesterday, I reported that two bombs exploded in Iran at a memorial for top military official Qassem Soleimani, who was killed by a U.S. drone strike four years ago. The explosion yesterday killed more than 100 people. Now, the Islamic State has taken credit for the “dual martyrdom operation” in which two suicide bombers “detonated explosive belts strapped to their bodies,” per The New York Times.
Floridians try to get abortion up until 24 weeks: Voters in the Sunshine State are trying to undo abortion restrictions by putting a constitutional right to an abortion on the 2024 ballot.
Florida currently bans abortion after 15 weeks, and Governor Ron DeSantis has also signed into law a ban on abortions after six weeks, which has not yet taken effect.
This is apparently not good enough for many impassioned Floridians. The deadline for getting this issue on the ballot is February 1; the activist group Floridians Protecting Freedom has gathered 863,876 certified signatures, just shy of the 891,876 they need, but with a few more weeks to go, they say it’s extremely likely they will get the issue added to the ballot, which would then require 60 percent voter approval to become law. Similar strategies proved successful this past year in Ohio, and the year before in Kansas.
Permitting abortion up until 24 weeks would make Florida far more progressive on this issue than pretty much every European nation, which tend to disallow abortion beyond the first trimester, or 12-13 weeks. Though most mainstream publications don’t mention it, babies are the size of an ear of corn around 24 weeks. They can hear sounds outside the mother’s body, they have tastebuds, and they can suck their thumbs.
My pro-life bias may be showing, admittedly, and many pro-choicers rebut that very few abortions happen after the first trimester (only 7 to 10 percent of abortions nationwide, though Guttmacher and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data differ in their estimates, which would conservatively total around 60,000, which…doesn’t seem negligible to me), but my point is this: the U.S. pro-choice movement is an outlier in attempting to make abortion broadly permissive this late in pregnancy.
It remains to be seen whether Florida voters will be persuaded by the activists’ efforts. |