Florida Appeals Court Puts Parental Rights Where They Belong

School districts across the country require parental notice or consent before minors may go on a field trip or even receive a cough drop. But for years, the Supreme Court said that those same minors have a constitutional right to get an abortion with minimal, if any, parental involvement.

Now, the legal tables may have finally turned. The U.S. and Florida supreme courts have said that neither the federal nor the Florida state constitution protects a right to abortion—and a Florida appeals court has now put parents’ right to direct their children’s upbringing back in its proper place.

Since 2004, the Florida Constitution has prohibited the legislature from “limit[ing] or deny[ing] the privacy right guaranteed to a minor under the United States Constitution as interpreted by the United States Supreme Court.”

Under state law, a minor can obtain an abortion without parental knowledge if a court deems her “sufficiently mature to decide whether to terminate her pregnancy” or decides that notification and consent would not be in her “best interest.”

In this case, a pregnant minor living with her parents asked for such a judicial finding, hoping to get an abortion before Florida’s six-week limit without their knowledge. The court denied her request and she appealed.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier entered the case to assert and defend the parents’ rights—a task he accomplished when the appeals court unanimously affirmed the lower court’s decision to deny the minor’s request to keep her parents in the dark.

“Whatever asserted constitutional abortion rights may have justified Florida’s judicial-waiver regime in the past,” the appeals court held, “[those] unequivocally have been repudiated by both the U.S. Supreme Court and the Florida Supreme Court.”

In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, holding that its decision to invent a right to abortion was “egregiously wrong” from “the day it was decided.” Two years later, the Florida Supreme Court held that the Florida Constitution’s protections for the right to privacy do not include abortion. 

Having pushed aside the interference of a fictional abortion right, the appeals court focused on the long-standing right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children. Specifically, it pointed to a “rich common-law tradition of empowering parents to order their children’s affairs, even over their children’s objections” that informs the Florida Constitution’s protection of parental rights.

The court also cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s designation of parents’ right to the “care, custody, and control of their children” as “perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.

“At a minimum,” the appeals court concluded, “the Fourteenth Amendment demands notice and an opportunity to be heard before a presumptively fit parent can be deprived of his or her right to be informed of and make medical decisions, including abortion decisions, for his or her child.” Laws empowering judges to make subjective exceptions “afford neither.”

This decision may be appealed to the Florida Supreme Court; but regardless of that outcome, this ruling suggests a roadmap for challenging similar laws in other states that also undermine parents’ fundamental right to direct their children’s upbringing.

The claim that minors can independently make a decision as profound as abortion has always been in jarring, especially in contrast to the presumption throughout the law that children cannot properly make far less significant decisions.

As the Supreme Court put it in 2021, “A child’s ‘lack of maturity’ and ‘underdeveloped sense of responsibility’ lead to recklessness, impulsivity, and heedless risk-taking.” That’s simply the nature of childhood. The Supreme Court pretended otherwise when it was pushing a fake right to abortion—but even the justices cannot change human nature.

Parents’ right to be involved in and direct their children’s upbringing faces attack on multiple fronts. During Roe v. Wade’s 50 years of life, countless babies were killed; families were pulled apart; and girls were left vulnerable. Thankfully, this decision points to a turn in a better direction.

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