ACLU: Anti-abortion bills assume women can't make sound judgements

In a video released on Monday, Maria Kayanan of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida decried legislation in the state's legislature that would restrict women's access to abortion.

"The House Subcommittee is hearing three separate abortion bills, all of which seek to intrude into a very difficult personal private medical decision that should remain between a woman, her doctor, her family and her faith," she said.

"One of the core missions of the ACLU is to protect the reproductive rights of women," Kayanan continued. "A woman should be able to decide whether and when to bare a family. If she decides to bare children, she should have the absolute best prenatal care available. If she decides not to go through with the pregnancy, she should have safe and legal access to good medical care. These bills all impede those rights and intrude upon the doctor-patient relationship, and they all presume that women simply don't know what is best for their own futures."

HB 839 would prohibit abortion if the probable age of the fetus was 20 or more weeks. Another bill, HB 277, would require that informed consent be completed 24 hours prior to the termination of a pregnancy and impose other restrictions.

Kayanan said that requiring patients to wait 24 hours before receiving an abortion "simply assumes the woman can't make a sound, reasoned judgement on her own, with her doctor as to whether or not she should wait 24 hours."

A third bill, HB 1151, would shutter all abortion clinics and criminalize almost all induced abortions.

Watch video, uploaded to YouTube, below: