Two years ago, the Florida Governor’s Office made preparations for a flashy bill signing for Florida’s House Bill 5, which banned most abortions past 15 weeks of pregnancy. The office specifically cherry-picked women and children to flank the Gov. Ron DeSantis, records show, as he signed this controversial ban into law.
Planning materials for the event, located at a church in Kissimmee, instructed most of the men invited to sit in the audience, out of public’s view of the stage.
“Only women and children on stage with the exception of [then-Florida House speaker Chris] Sprowls and [then-Florida Senate president Wilton] who will be on the very ends,” the emailed instructions, obtained through a public records request, read. “Female legislators should be intermingled with women and children.
It was political theater, plain and simple. Something both major parties have been guilty of at times — with the intent of sending a message, and with fingers crossed for how such antics land.
Two years later, Florida men are inviting themselves off the sidelines, organizing with groups like Men 4 Choice to actively encourage other men to vote in support of protecting abortion rights in Florida.
Last Friday, a group of just over a dozen men gathered at an apartment complex in Kissimmee (with another dozen joining virtually on Zoom) to make calls in support of Florida's Amendment 4. The proposed constitutional amendment would put abortion rights into Florida’s state constitution, if approved by voters this fall, and would restore the right to have an abortion up to fetal viability, or roughly 24 weeks of pregnancy. GOP opponents claim otherwise, calling it “extreme.”
Preeghary Patino, a 22-year-old who attended the phone bank, told Orlando Weekly that for him, the reason for supporting Amendment 4 is simple. “I don’t like someone taking the freedom away from another person,” he said. “That’s the main focus of this, right? Like, women should have the right to choose.”
According to voter engagement organization Mi Vecino, which co-hosted the event, the Florida men made over 11,600 calls on Friday total, targeting young, male registered voters in Florida under age 35.
After hearing about Amendment 4 from phone-bankers, 75 percent of voters who answered calls said they would vote yes on the measure, 11 percent said they would vote no and 14 percent said they were undecided. Of those undecided, nearly half (47 percent) explained it was because they didn't have enough information yet to make an informed decision.
Currently, abortion in Florida is banned after six weeks of pregnancy (before many people even learn they're pregnant), with limited exceptions that abortion providers themselves say are causing confusion.
After DeSantis signed the 15-week ban into law in 2022, Florida’s GOP-controlled Legislature decided to go even further last year, approving a six-week ban that officially went into effect May 1, decimating abortion access in Florida and across the broader U.S. South. More than 60 percent of abortions performed in Florida last year occurred after six weeks of pregnancy.
Patino, a young field organizer for Mi Vecino, is originally from the Dominican Republic, a country where abortion is completely banned and people who get abortions face up to two years' prison time.
He got involved in political advocacy work at age 18. Young people like himself, he said, “are the future of this country.” Sitting on the sidelines, if you're passionate about an issue, isn't an option for him. “If you got a goal, you [have] got to fight for the goal.”
Mi Vecino, first launched in 2021, is a year-round voter engagement organization that aims to encourage political participation among Florida’s multicultural Hispanic and Latino communities. A number of Republican party officials and experts have seen Hispanic voters in Florida aligning themselves more with the GOP in recent years, the Miami Herald recently reported, while some say these communities aren't really aligning with either major party.
“We’re losing voters of color,” Alejandro “Alex” Berrios, a former Florida Democratic Party senior advisor and co-founder of Mi Vecino, told Orlando Weekly at the phone bank. “We’re especially losing men where now, the plurality of men in Florida are just unaffiliated,” Berrios continued. “They want nothing to do with either party, you know?”
Patino, who’s gone out to knock doors for Florida’s Amendment 4 on behalf of Mi Vecino, has been pleasantly surprised by the warm reception he’s received from voters about the issue, including men.
“Most of the men that I talk to, they say a woman should have the right to do whatever they want,” Patino said. “Like, [the] woman should have the freedom to do whatever they want with their body. They don’t want the government [to] take the rights of the woman.”
Outside Florida, the nearest states to get an abortion beyond six weeks of pregnancy are North Carolina (where abortion is legal up to 12 weeks), Virginia and Illinois, where clinics have reported notable upticks in patients from Florida.
“Rich people are always going to be able to travel across the country to get the medical care that they need, but people who don't have access to resources, don’t have safe people in their communities that they can go to for support, continue to be disproportionately impacted,” Qudsiyyah Shariyf, deputy director of the Chicago Abortion Fund, told WUSF in an interview last month. “Those are the people that are making the decisions to not get the care that they need because they feel like no resources are available to them.”
Mi Vecino organized Friday's phone bank in collaboration with Men 4 Choice. Both have endorsed Florida’s Amendment 4, which is being spearheaded by the nonpartisan political committee Floridians Protecting Freedom.
The official title for the ballot measure is “Amendment to Limit Government Interference in Abortion” — a title that is notably (and purposely) devoid of partisan messaging.
Berrios, a former boxer and dad who climbed his way up the ranks of the Florida Democratic Party before departing from the FDP in early 2022, said that Mi Vecino aims to reach voters of all party affiliations in their outreach, not just Democrats.
Berrios, who initially campaigned last year to become Florida Democratic Party chair before withdrawing from the race to endorse current chair Nikki Fried, said that, in terms of abortion, it's important to challenge assumptions about what someone may or may not support.
“One of our organizers had the greatest conversation with a woman wearing a 'Fuck Joe Biden' T-shirt,” he recalled, candidly, “who then signed the petition [for Amendment 4] and supports abortion rights.”
This is true broadly speaking, but also for the communities Mi Vecino specifically targets in their outreach. A recent poll of Latino voters from Unidos U.S., for instance, found that 68 percent of polled Latino voters in Florida agree that, no matter their own personal beliefs on abortion, they believe “it is wrong to make abortion illegal and take that choice away from everyone else.”
Floridians Protecting Freedom, the group behind the initiative, has put in a concerted effort to keep their messaging on Amendment 4 nonpartisan, and has highlighted the voices of Republicans who have spoken out in support of it.
While polling has found Democrats (and women) more likely to support the measure, some conservatives are also organizing across the state to help make other conservatives feel welcome in the movement, the Tampa Bay Times reported, despite well-funded efforts by many in Florida's GOP leadership, including DeSantis, to defeat the initiative.
“We know that the majority of Floridians support abortion access free from government interference and are eager to have their voices heard at the ballot box this November,” Natasha Sutherland, FPF's communications director, told the Times in a statement.
So far, Mi Vecino (a statewide group with the bulk of its staff in Central Florida) has knocked over 150,000 doors in Florida for Amendment 4, according to a spokesperson for the group, and is planning on organizing future phone banks in support of the issue, too.
Not all will exclusively target men, and any and all members of the public are invited to join. Amendment 4 needs a "yes" vote from at least 60 percent of voters this in order to pass, and a number of organizations in the state are mobilizing volunteers to spread the word.
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