We’re marching for life. I kind of feel like we have a lot of momentum. So there’s this issue that the president has introduced, which I’m supportive of, to say the Constitution doesn’t give birthright citizenship to people that are here illegally. I think that’s the right decision of the Constitution. But it’s interesting, not everyone likes that. And so the New York Times had a hit piece going against this. And here was their headline. Undocumented women ask, will my unborn child be a citizen? So the New York Times is admitting it’s not just a clump of cells. Let’s welcome the New York Times to the pro-life movement. Wow.
Here is what you should be asking your elected officials to do on the issue of the sanctity of life. Show courage in defense of the unborn. That’s what we need from the people that we elect to the office. The sanctity of life does not depend on poll results. It doesn’t depend on which way the wind is blowing. It’s an enduring truth, and it represents the foundation of our society, which in our original founding document, which we will celebrate next year, the Declaration of Independence, declared that we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, beginning with the right to life itself.
And I remember when Dobbs came down, it was a big victory for the pro-life movement, but a lot of people didn’t necessarily know what were you going to do, what was the left going to do? There were all these things going, and what the left did is they poured hundreds of millions of dollars into these ballot initiatives, and in 2022, they swept the country. I think they won every single ballot initiative in favor of many times abortion on demand until birth.
So we then in 2024 cycle, we were facing in Florida one of these initiatives in our state, and it was very deceptively won the ballot. They put $120 million, they put $120 million into enacting this as part of our constitution. The media was behind them 100%. Now this would have been the most radical amendment in the nation. It would have led to 40,000 abortions in Florida every single year and would have made Florida the epicenter for abortion tourism because we’re in the southeast, which is the most pro-life part of the country. So the stakes were very high here.
Now most elected officials, they’ll say, look, what’s on the ballot is not their issue. Like people can decide and they wash their hands of it and they walk away. But you know, I remember a great man once said the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. So we were not just going to sit around in Florida and do nothing. We had a responsibility to lead the charge and to do something that most people said was impossible, defeat a pro-abortion ballot measure in a state who quite frankly does not necessarily have overwhelming pro-life sentiment. And so this was very difficult because what the pro-abortion side does, they don’t tell the truth.
They rely on a blizzard of lies to try to be able to enact these things. So if you turned on TV in Florida last fall, you were told that Florida’s heartbeat bill somehow didn’t allow pregnant women to get healthcare when they had a miscarriage or all these other things, which were bold face lies. They never made the case as to why you should have elective abortions on demand up until nine months. They never made that case. They were focusing on running commercials that were lying about what we were doing in Florida. So this was difficult because, you know, people see it on TV and they think it’s true. So this was all hands on deck. So we decided we had no choice but to dig in and lead, that we had all these lives that depended on this.
So we raised millions of dollars. We mobilized activists, not just in the state of Florida, but around the country to come and help in Florida. Many of you were part of that. We pressured our elected officials to get involved. We barnstormed the state. I had physicians against Amendment 4. We had survivors of abortion talking against Amendment 4. You name it, we did it. We even mobilized our state agencies and we ran public service announcements dispelling the lies that were being told about Florida’s heartbeat bill. But we were doing this, quite frankly, against the tide of public opinion. The win was in our face. The win was not in our backs. But you know, it’s easy to lead when the win’s at your back. Anybody can do that.
The question is, when those things are, when you have all the odds stacked against you, are you going to dig in and are you going to do what’s right? And I’m proud to say that we defeated this radical pro-abortion amendment. And we were the first state in the United States to ever defeat one. But here’s one of the lessons. We were told since Dobbs by people, political consultants, pundits, many people that are more establishment Republicans, that standing for the right to life was somehow terrible politics. You wouldn’t get elected, all this other stuff. Well, I can tell you, I’m proof that that’s not true. Because when Dobbs was overturned, I ran on a pro-life platform on the Heartbeat Protection Act and I won the largest victory that any Republican has ever won in the history of the state of Florida.
And I can report to you now, years later, not one single member of the Florida legislature has been defeated for voting for Florida’s Heartbeat Protection Act. Not one has been defeated as a result of that. And even more so, to show you the politics isn’t what they say, since I signed Florida’s Heartbeat Bill a couple years ago, we have gained 800,000 registered Republicans on the Democrats since we signed the legislation. So don’t let the naysayers say that you’ve got to toss away these important convictions and that you shouldn’t stand for the right to life. We showed how it can be done in the state of Florida.
You know, we’re proud that in the last six years since I’ve been governor, on issue after issue, we have defeated the political left, getting rid of DEI, beating them on illegal immigration, doing all these different things, to the point where Florida is now known as the state where woke goes to die. But let me tell you, since we were able to beat Amendment 4, Florida’s not only the place where woke goes to die, it’s the place where babies go to live. Thank you. God bless you. Keep up the great work.
*In 2018, Ron DeSantis was elected Florida’s 46th governor. He is known for his pro-life stances, and through his efforts Florida ranks first in the economy (among all 50 US states); education (two years in a row); higher education (eight years in a row); attracting and developing a talented workforce; parental empowerment and educational freedom; tourism and net immigration; and recruiting and supporting law enforcement. Gov. DeSantis is married to Casey DeSantis, an Emmy Award-winning television anchor. Together, they are the parents of their daughters, Madison and Mamie, and their son, Mason.
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