The Anti-Abortion Messages Haunting Florida’s Highways

 

Opinion

The Anti-Abortion Messages Haunting Florida’s Highways

Credit...

Photographs and Text by Damon Winter

Mr. Winter is a staff photographer on assignment in Opinion.

 

April 22, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/22/opinion/anti-abortion-florida-billboards.html

 

MIAMI — There was no fanfare, no live broadcast, no backdrop of uniformed schoolchildren to cheer him on. At 11:27 p.m. on April 13, hours after the closed-door ceremony, Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office sent out an email with the subject line: “Governor DeSantis Signs Two Bills.” One was titled Causes of Action Based on Improvements to Real Property; the other was one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, effectively banning abortion after six weeks.

 

Early the next morning, Mr. DeSantis left Tallahassee to resume his book tour and deliver a speech at Liberty University in Virginia, the conservative Christian bastion of anti-abortion activism. Even there, he couldn’t find the nerve to mention his Heartbeat Protection Act.

 

Mr. DeSantis knows that banning abortion isn’t popular. The issue has been a losing one for Republicans in races across the country since Roe v. Wade was overturned last June. And according to a 2022 poll by Florida Atlantic University, 67 percent of Florida voters want abortion to be legal in most cases and only 12 percent support an outright ban. But as the governor prepares to run for president, he needs to keep hard-right primary voters satisfied.

 

As I watched all this unfold, I couldn’t help noting the contrast between the governor’s seeming desire to hide the abortion bill out of sight with the way some of the most ardent supporters of the law make their position known.

 

The billboards were one of the first things I noticed when my family and I moved to Central Florida in 2021. We drove around the state a lot, and as we made our way through the sprawl of the Miami suburbs, across the upper reaches of the Everglades where a river of grass transitions to a sea of sugar cane, through the citrus groves of aptly named towns like Frostproof and Fruitland Park, I was struck by the number of anti-abortion billboards we passed on the roadside.

 

Recently, I set out on a road trip to document some of the many billboards standing in the empty parking lots of long-forgotten motels and strip clubs. I sought out the signs that loom over early morning commuters at corner gas stations and provide a little extra income for the Pentecostal churches and boarded-up restaurants that host them. Along quiet country roads, they keep the cows and crows company; on bustling, strip-mall-lined boulevards they jockey for attention with an alarming number of ads for personal injury lawyers.

 

Right now, a woman in Florida is about a half-hour drive, on average, from a place where she can get an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, according to research by Caitlin Myers, an economist at Middlebury College. When the bill that Mr. DeSantis signed last week goes into effect, that drive will, for most women, take over nine hours, much of it along these very highways. It’s a long road ahead.

 

Damon Winter is a staff photographer on assignment for Opinion. He received the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography.