DeSantis Seeks to Silence Brain Cancer Patient Speaking Out About Her Abortion
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is putting the full weight of the Florida government behind an effort to defeat a ballot measure that would protect abortion access in the state — including by enlisting government lawyers in a campaign to silence a young mother with terminal brain cancer who is warning of the danger Florida’s strict ban poses to women like her.
This November, Florida residents will have the opportunity to vote on Amendment 4; if passed, the measure will enshrine the right to abortion “before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health” in Florida’s constitution. The pitch is broadly popular with Floridians: A September poll showed the measure attracting support from 76 percent of voters.
But DeSantis, who has signed two separate abortion bans into law — restricting the procedure first at 15 weeks, then six weeks gestation — is desperately trying to tank Amendment 4. First, he worked with the Heritage Foundation to add language to the ballot measure implying that re-legalizing abortion would have a negative fiscal impact on the state. Amid that baseless warning, state agencies began spending public money on TV and radio ads peddling misinformation about the measure, as well as a website that claims Amendment 4 “threatens women’s safety.”
Now, DeSantis is trying to keep a cancer patient named Caroline from sharing the story of her abortion by threatening to criminally prosecute TV stations that carry the Amendment 4 ad featuring her story.
The first time she was pregnant, Caroline was terribly nauseous all nine months. The second time started off as a comparative breeze. “She was such an easy pregnancy — until everything happened,” she says.
Caroline, whose last name Rolling Stone agreed to withhold for privacy and safety concerns, was 18 weeks along when she started losing her speech. “I could read a book, understand it, but the words that came out of my mouth were different,” she says. “At first I thought maybe pregnancy brain, until it became so bad within one week that I was teaching a class, and it was very much like stroke symptoms — I wasn’t able to talk, I wasn’t able to read, I was very confused, and my sister, who is a nurse, told me to go to the hospital.”
Because she was pregnant, the hospital was cautious: She couldn’t get a CT scan out of concern for her baby, but she could get an MRI — without the contrast. The results came back, and they showed a large mass on the language sector of her brain — but without the detail that contrast might provide, it was hard to tell what it was. Her doctors said it might be a hemorrhagic stroke or a brain bleed of some kind. Or it could be a tumor.
Caroline’s medical team advised her to wait, and see if whatever the image showed might be reabsorbed by her brain. “But within a week,” she says, “I got way worse. The mass grew a lot, and by then I wasn’t able to say what month it was, what day, who the president was — anything.”
She was advised to undergo surgery, which revealed a malignant tumor — a grade IV glioma. Glioblastoma is the deadliest form of brain cancer; there is no cure, and treatment can only slow its progression. Less than seven percent of patients survive five years after diagnosis, according to the National Brain Tumor Society.
It was at this point that Caroline understood that she would have to terminate her pregnancy to obtain treatment for her cancer. “I just wanted to see my little girl again,” she says. “I wanted to keep my baby as well. But … I wouldn’t be able to do the chemo nor the radiation, and they wanted me to get on that as soon as possible, because my tumor was very fast-growing.”
By the time she had an affirmative diagnosis, Caroline was 21 weeks along. It was 2022, and abortion was still legal in Florida, the state where she has lived for more than 20 years. The abortion was a two-day process and emotionally devastating — “absolutely the hardest decision I’ve ever made in my life,” she says — but she was able to terminate her pregnancy at a facility near her home.
Today, Florida has a six-week abortion ban — one of the harshest restrictions in the nation, with extremely limited exceptions and extraordinarily onerous requirements to qualify for those exceptions. (DeSantis signed the law into effect a little less than a year after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending the federal right to abortion.)
Caroline is speaking out about her abortion in support of Amendment 4, the ballot measure that would enshrine the right to access an abortion in Florida’s constitution if it is approved by at least 60 percent of Florida voters this November.
“The doctors knew if I did not end my pregnancy, I would lose my baby, I would lose my life, and my daughter would lose her mom,” Caroline says in a TV spot for the campaign, which went on the air last week. “Florida has now banned abortions even in cases like mine.”
The day after the ad began airing, DeSantis’ Department of Health, through its general counsel, John Wilson, dispatched a letter to Florida-based television stations carrying the ad, calling Caroline’s assertions “false” and “dangerous,” and the ad itself a “sanitary nuisance,” while threatening the TV stations with criminal penalties if the ad was not taken down within 24 hours. (The “sanitary nuisance” logic is circuitous, but essentially, Wilson argues the ad puts the lives of Florida women in danger, and thus constitutes a crime of the kind the health department is authorized to prosecute.)
Wilson claims Florida’s ban would not prevent women in Caroline’s situation from obtaining an abortion — it would merely make the process extremely burdensome for a cancer patient like her. “[A]n abortion may be performed if ‘two physicians certify in writing that, in reasonable medical judgment the termination of the pregnancy is necessary to save the pregnant woman’s life or avert a serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman other than a psychological condition,’” Wilson writes.
A recent report from Physicians for Human Rights recounted similar obstacles a patient suffering from terminal pancreatic cancer encountered after she became unexpectedly pregnant. “Because she had been on and off chemotherapy and radiation for the better part of five years, because of her recurrences, her periods had been irregular for ages … She has always wanted to be pregnant, but never could because of her treatments,” the woman’s OB-GYN told researchers. “Her oncologist said, ‘We have to stop treatment unless you have an abortion, essentially because this poses a risk to the pregnancy.’”
In that instance, it took more than a week for that doctor to get the specific documentation that would justify a health exception under Florida’s ban, then arrange for an abortion at a hospital that could accommodate her medical risks, a four-hour drive from her home.
“You want to grab these Supreme Court judges and bring them in the room and say, ‘Look what you are doing to people,’” the woman’s doctor told PHR. “Let this woman be able to receive palliative chemotherapy, which is the least we can do for her, for Christ’s sake.”
Lawyers representing Amendment 4 are accusing the Department of Health of an “unconstitutional attempt to coerce the station into censoring protected speech,” and demanding the stations keep the ad up on the air. “This is not just an unfounded request, it is an unconstitutional state action,” lawyers with the Elias Law Group wrote. “The letter is a textbook example of government coercion that violates the First Amendment.”
Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel seems to agree. “The right of broadcasters to speak freely is rooted in the First Amendment,” Rosenworcel said in a statement on Tuesday. “Threats against broadcast stations for airing content that conflicts with the government’s views are dangerous and undermine the fundamental principle of free speech.”
Lawyers for Amendment 4 go on to dispute Wilson’s characterization of the ad. “Caroline’s diagnosis was terminal. Practically, that means that an abortion would not have saved her life, only extended it,” they write, arguing that Florida’s ban does not include exceptions for such cases, attaching a signed declaration for a doctor attesting to that fact.
So far, DeSantis’ administration appears to be losing the argument. As of Tuesday, no Florida television stations had agreed to take down Caroline’s ad.
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