By Dave Andrusko
Traveling to key states immediately after he announced his candidacy for President, pro-life Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis told WMUR in New Hampshire that “I stand for a culture of life and in Florida the protection for unborn babies starts when there is detectable heartbeat.”
He added, “And now there are exceptions for rape, incest, life of the mother, victims of human trafficking and all that. And that was important to a lot of our legislators and people in Florida.”
In a one-on-one with WMUR’s Steve Bottari last Thursday, DeSantis was asked about Florida’s recently passed fetal heartbeat law. “You’re not going to have Iowa and New Hampshire end up being the same,” DeSantis said. “You’re not going to have Pennsylvania and Georgia being the same. So we understand that.”
Alluding to pro-abortion Democrats who wish to undermine the Dobbs decision, he said, “But I think we want to protect the rights of states to be able to make those judgments, particularly states that are protecting life.”
“And so as president, you know, certainly we would fight back against the left trying to force abortion up until the moment of birth. And I think we’d be successful in being able to stop that,” he said.
“Look at the end of the day, you know, promoting a culture of life is really a bottom up movement. And I recognize that and I want to maintain these communities and states to be able to resolve in a favorable way. I think you probably will save more lives if you focus on a bottom up approach,” DeSantis concluded.
On April 14, Gov. DeSantis signed Florida’s Heartbeat Act after the bill passed the House earlier in the evening in a vote of 70-40.
The law allows abortion throughout pregnancy to protect the life of the mother or in cases of reported rape, incest, medical emergency or when the child has a fatal condition, but it will protect unborn children from elective abortion after 6 weeks of pregnancy—a time at which the unborn child has a beating heart.
The vast majority of abortions are performed on healthy babies of healthy mothers who are conceived consensually, and half of these elective abortions take place after 6 weeks—after the baby has a beating heart.