Want less government? Vote for abortion rights | Letters to the editor

The proposed constitutional amendment known as Amendment 4 would allow abortions up to about the 24th week of pregnancy, just as Florida law had allowed up until Gov. Ron DeSantis enacted a 15-week abortion ban in 2022.

On May 1, DeSantis’ six-week abortion ban became law; many women and girls at that point don’t even know they are pregnant.

History proves that people are going to continue to need abortion access. Desperation leads to back-alley, unsafe solutions.

I am a senior citizen, so I remember reading about those horror stories more than 50 years ago.

If you are young, you might not appreciate the pain and harm that both women and girls suffered before they had safe choices available for extremely difficult personal decisions.

Books such as “Looking for Jane” and “The Lost Child of Philomena Lee” remind us of the other side of the story. Some women were forced to deliver and forced to give up for adoption babies they wanted to keep, just because of other people’s religious views. Sadly, art imitates life, often painfully so.

On Election Day, Nov. 5, please vote “Yes on 4” to end the six-week ban and allow our fellow citizens to make decisions about their own bodies without government interference. If you support less government, then vote yes on Amendment 4.

Candy Banks, Jupiter 

Back off, Legislature

The Florida Legislature needs to remove itself from our medical care and our medical records.

Lawmakers should unshackle physicians, so they can write appropriate pain medication to people with chronic and acute pain without fear. Millions of Floridians are living life with chronic and acute pains that Advil and Tylenol cannot control.

I understand that during the “Pill Mill” crisis there needed to definitely be an adjustment, and those pill mills needed to be shut down. I was a person who wrote, fought for and picketed on the streets towards that purpose.

The pill mills were closed, but now it has gone completely in the opposite direction.

Doctors are afraid to prescribe adequate pain medications, and now lawmakers are getting involved in our women’s medical health and scaring doctors providing care. Enough is enough.

Florida state government needs to get out of our medical records and leave medical care to the medical professionals.

Diane Miller, Plantation

Abortion ban consequences

Unwanted children are frequently unloved children.

We know where this often leads —  to anger, aggression, drugs and incarceration.

All four of which create stress on a society and its resources. Now that Florida has enacted a six-week abortion ban, what provisions have been established for the care of the unwanted children many women will now be forced to have?

Is the state of Florida going to care for these kids, feed them, school them and love them?

Stacie M. Kiner, Hypoluxo

A neat juxtaposition

What a wonderful juxtaposition.

While reading a letter to the editor by David Ellenberg, criticizing President Joe Biden for not speaking out against the campus protests, what should come on the news, but Biden calling out the violence and antisemitism on those campuses.

The president plainly and clearly condemned both as having no place in our country. Hopefully, this will inform people like Ellenberg that Biden is not sympathetic to the antisemitism or violence being perpetrated on these campuses.

Peaceful protests are part of our democracy, but what some of these protesters have done is not.

Steven Hoover, Margate