On a Sunday evening outside Orlando’s Kia Center, one month before the U.S. election, a snaking crowd dressed in bright green and black lace waits in the rain for the doors to open for a Charli XCX-Troye Sivan concert. The teenagers and twentysomethings in line are easy marks for Amelia Zehnder, 26, a canvasser with the pro-choice group Floridians Protecting Freedom. She’s handing out friendship bracelets and voter pledge cards, while reminding them that, in this election, the stakes are especially high for their generation: The people of Florida will decide whether to restore a woman’s right to choose.
The beads on the bracelets spell out slogans such as “Brat for 4.” It’s a play on the one-word title of Charli XCX’s latest album and Amendment 4, which will be on the ballot in Florida on Nov. 5, when Americans also cast their vote for president.
If the amendment passes, it will reverse the state’s six-month-old Heartbeat Protection Act – which bans abortion after six weeks – and enshrine the right to abortion up to the viability of the fetus, or around 24 weeks, in the state’s constitution.
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, 2022, nearly half of U.S. states have passed various levels of restrictions on abortion, with 13 banning the procedure outright. Constitutional amendments related to restoring or protecting abortion rights will be on fall ballots in 10 states across the country.
Abortion access, long a subject of polarizing debate in the United States, has become particularly personal and heated this election. The Republicans’ hard-line anti-abortion stand is unpopular with the majority of Americans, according to surveys. In some conservative states, citizen amendments have already overturned restrictions that came in after the Supreme Court ruling. And while Donald Trump, who will vote in Florida, has flip-flopped on his view of Amendment 4, his rival Kamala Harris has been impassioned about her support for abortion rights. Democrats hope the issue will bring out more voters in their favour.
But for young women in Florida such as Ms. Zehnder, all of this looms much larger than politicking in a divided country; it’s about freedom and safety and being treated as equals capable of making a deeply personal decision about their health care, families and futures.
For months now, they have been knocking on doors, dialling numbers, posting on social media and working tables at fairs and campus events, all in an effort to restore the abortion rights that have been eroded in Florida. With the election looming, a single weekend in early October provides a snapshot of their efforts to persuade enough strangers to vote yes on a health care question they consider a fundamental freedom.
Chastity Nix, 21, was driven into activism to make her voice heard. The fall of Roe v. Wade contributed to her loss of faith that 'the adults' would look out for her generation.
On the same evening as the concert, for example, Lola Fontanez, 18, and Chastity Nix, 21, are camped out in their Orlando apartments, making calls to remind people about the amendment. In St. Petersburg, with Hurricane Milton gathering strength in the Gulf of Mexico, Alexis Hobbs, 21, is making plans for her next campus event, where she and a team of volunteers will hand out Amendment 4 flyers, along with condoms and boxes of Plan B.
These final weeks before the election will be the most intense, their last chance to secure the supermajority, or 60 per cent, needed to pass Amendment 4 – a threshold higher than in other states. There are a million more registered Republicans than Democrats in the state; for the amendment to succeed, a significant number of right-leaning Floridians will have to check the affirmative bubbles on their ballots in November.
It won’t be easy. Two days after the Charli XCX concert, a New York Times poll, conducted with Siena College, found that of 554 likely Florida voters, only 46 per cent said they supported the amendment. Other polling conducted in the summer and fall suggests a higher rate of support, although still below 60 per cent in most cases. Those same polls also suggest, however, that the amendment would easily pass if only young people, and especially young women, were voting.
Chastity Nix (left) and Lola Fontanez, students at the University of Central Florida and activists in the campaign to restore abortion rights in the state, make friendship bracelets for a future canvassing shift.
Ms. Nix was driven into activism because she wanted her voice heard. Her younger self, she says, used to have faith that “the adults” would look out for her generation. She learned her lesson after Roe fell: “You can’t trust other people to make the right decision for you. You have to put the work in.”
On the Friday night, in the library of the University of Central Florida, she’s making friendship bracelets for a future canvassing shift with Ms. Fontanez.
“For all my life,” Ms. Fontanez says, while sliding beads on a wire, “there have been threats to my autonomy.”
In university, it’s abortion. In high school, there were book bans. On her 10th birthday, Ms. Fontanez woke up to sirens and screaming: A gunman had murdered 49 people at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando just a block from her family’s ground-floor duplex unit. That morning, she watched people in blankets being treated by paramedics; later in the week, she attended the neighbourhood vigil for the victims.
“I was old enough to understand that it was a hateful person who hurt a lot of people for being who they are,” Ms. Fontanez says.
On campus, she meets students who choose to be “silently supportive” of Amendment 4 because they don’t want to cause rifts in their conservative families. She gets it. Among her own Puerto Rican relatives, “I have people I love who will vote no.”
But this is how injustice happens, she says. “People being silent.”
Lola Fontanez, a freshman at UCF, says joining the fight for reproductive rights is empowering in the midst of increasing fear and uncertainty.
Anger is motivating, but roiling underneath is real fear. These young women already know the stories of others in the United States who have died – or come terribly close – because doctors wouldn’t provide care for pregnancy complications.
They worry about those same risks when, and if, they want kids, and what could happen, right now, if they find themselves pregnant without realizing it in time. Ms. Nix experienced this scare a couple of months ago; she took repeated pregnancy tests until she was confident in the negative results. “Once you’re in that spot, it’s like your brain empties,” she says. “I was at the point where I would take one every day because I wanted to be 1,000-per-cent sure.”
If their abortion rights are lost, the women ask, what comes next? Across the country, there have already been discussions about restrictions on contraception and in vitro fertilization. The controversial Supreme Court abortion ruling sparked talk of challenging same-sex marriage. “It can only get worse from here,” Ms. Fontanez says.
None of this is an overreaction, they will tell you. After all, they’re the ones suddenly fighting for rights their grandmother’s generation believed they’d won 50 years ago.
Joining that fight “does make you feel a bit more powerful and a little less alone,” Ms. Fontanez says. And sometimes, she adds, you meet a person who doesn’t agree with you, but the longer you talk, the more common ground you find – and with it, more hope. “You can take a deep breath,” she says, and keep going.
But will it be enough?
Sasha Hernandez speaks to local resident Anthony Martinez while canvassing his neighbourhood near Orlando. Hernandez works with Mi Vecino, a nonpartisan non-profit voter registration organization for Latino communities.
Sasha Hernandez knocks at the door of the first house on her canvassing route in Kissimmee, a city south of Orlando, on the blistering hot Friday afternoon. Anthony Martinez, a 60-year-old air-conditioning contractor, opens the door. He listens while Ms. Hernandez gives her spiel. Is he registered to vote? (He is.) What’s the biggest issue for him this election? (The economy.) What does he know about Amendment 4? (Not much, but he’s willing to listen.) “I don’t believe in abortion,” he says, but he thinks there should be exceptions for incest or to save the mother’s life.
Ms. Hernandez hands him an information flyer, and thanks him for his time. In an interview afterward, Mr. Martinez says, “I am Trump all the way.” As for Amendment 4, he’s less certain: “I would have to read more about it.”
Still, Ms. Hernandez considers this a successful encounter, especially since Mr. Martinez closed the door with the flyer in his hand. The 42-year-old single mom of three works for Mi Vecino, Spanish for “My Neighbor,” a non-profit that canvasses year-round to increase voter turnout among Florida’s Latino residents.
The organization was co-founded three years ago by 29-year-old Devon Murphy-Anderson, who’s from a lobster-fishing family in Maine, and Alejandro Berrios, a former boxer of Cuban and Puerto Rican descent. The pair came up with the idea after Republicans swept Florida in the 2020 election. Working in senior positions for the state’s Democrats, they felt the party had lost Hispanic voters by failing to invest in door-knocking and relationship-building.
Ms. Murphy-Anderson, Mi Vecino’s chief executive officer, has tagged along with Ms. Hernandez to their target neighbourhood, a tidy row of stucco bungalows in a predominantly Latino area. She uses the time to post updates to social media and pitch a potential donor from her car.
“Since March, 2021, we have been on the ground every single day,” Ms. Murphy-Anderson says. The organization employs a roster of Spanish-speaking canvassers who are trained to avoid the word “abortion” entirely and instead frame the issue around health care, family privacy and an overstepping government. It’s messaging, she explains, that they believe resonates better with the Latin American community.
That afternoon, Ms. Hernandez chats with half a dozen people, and leaves flyers at the doors that don’t open. A twentysomething holding back his large dog says he’s pro-choice, but isn’t registered to vote; she shows him a QR code on the information flyer that takes him through the steps. Another man answers the door, clearly sick; he is angry about the ban, knows all about the amendment and is ready to vote for it. From her doorstep, an elderly woman chats with Ms. Hernandez in Spanish. Abortion, she says, conflicts with her religious beliefs, but for the sake of her granddaughter she is voting yes.
Mr. Martinez, however, is the typical Florida voter: conservative, focused on the economy and not personally pro-choice. He may end up marking “no” on his ballot, but, as Ms. Murphy-Anderson explains, there are three other registered voters in his house, and perhaps a daughter or wife to nudge him toward yes. “He now has this piece of literature, and maybe at dinner, or when they’re making a plan to vote, the conversation comes up. We see positive ripple effects over time.”
Since the new restrictions came into effect last May, The Orlando Women’s Centre, like all reproductive health clinics in Florida, can only perform an abortion if the patient is less than six weeks pregnant. Many women, however, don’t realize they are pregnant that early, so they now have to travel hundreds of miles out of state to receive abortion care.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and the state’s Republican-controlled legislature have fought Amendment 4 with zeal, prompting several court challenges. Since the amendment’s place on the ballot was secured with nearly one million signatures, the state’s election police unit has been investigating the effort for evidence of fraud, including making house calls to confirm the identities of people who signed it.
The Florida Agency for Health Care Administration, responsible for licensing abortion clinics, has created a Florida is Protecting Life website to challenge the amendment. “Don’t let the fearmongers lie to you,” it reads in bold across the top; Amendment 4 “threatens women’s safety,” it declares in red. Earlier, this month, the state’s Health Department sent cease-and-desist letters to Florida TV stations, threatening criminal action if they continued running a pro-amendment commercial.
Even if Amendment 4 passes, activists are bracing for the next fight. Worried that birth control might be restricted, Audrey Hopper, the 19-year-old deputy campaign manager for Sarah Henry, a Democratic legislative candidate in a county just outside Orlando, is considering getting an intrauterine device (IUD) – a choice other young women also mentioned. “They won’t be able to rip that out of my body,” Ms. Hopper says.
The current abortion law does allow exceptions for rape, incest, human trafficking and to save the life of the mother. But pro-choice groups and physicians point out that the requirements to meet them are onerous. Women must provide an official police report, which forces sexual-assault victims to take an often difficult step before they may be ready. The health exemptions, which critics say are poorly defined, require two doctors’ signatures, and physicians risk fines, loss of their licence or jail if a mistake is deemed to have been made.
“Good luck finding a second physician who knows the case as intimately as you do, and is comfortable putting their neck out there,” says Chelsea Daniels, a doctor with Planned Parenthood in Miami who provides abortions.
The most well-known example in Florida of that health care reality is Anya Cook, who told her story at the Democratic National Convention this summer. Her water broke after just 16 weeks, but she was sent home from the hospital because her fetus still had a heartbeat. She miscarried in a hair salon bathroom, and almost bled to death, before finally being readmitted for medical care.
Simon Rodes, a clinic escort volunteer at The Orlando Women’s Centre, looks on as a man shouts anti-abortion sentiments at the women inside.
Dr. Daniels worries that for young women in particular, the new law is “causing irreparable damage to their faith in science and medicine.” The “cruel nature of this ban,” she added, “is that by the time women have missed a period, they may already be four weeks pregnant. They are on the clock before they even know they are on the clock.”
That leaves them little time to make an informed decision about what they want to do. Dr. Daniels recently saw a young nursing student beyond the six-week timeline who was afraid to tell her abusive father that she was pregnant. “She poured her heart out to me.” But all Dr. Daniels could do was direct her to a team of patient navigators who would help her travel hundreds of kilometres out of state to get care.
In St. Petersburg, Ms. Hobbs experiences a kind of survivor’s guilt when she reflects on the real-life devastation being caused by limits to abortion access. She knows that in the same situation her family would come instantly to her aid. Her parents were high-school sweethearts who found themselves facing an unplanned pregnancy; they had Ms. Hobbs when they were 21 years old, the same age she is now. The young family struggled financially for many years, and Ms. Hobbs’s parents didn’t go back to school to get professional health care degrees until she was a teenager.
They often told her that having kids is all about timing; get a degree and start a career first. “They were amazing parents,” says Ms. Hobbs, who has law school in her sights, “but it could have been easier in the doing. So I always have that in the front of my mind.”
It’s Saturday morning, and Ms. Hobbs is canvassing on the north side of the city. In addition to her volunteer activism on campus, she works for Yes on 4, a collection of organizations across the state that have banded together to support the amendment. Both groups are non-partisan, so she never wades into party politics when people come to the door. The amendment, she says, is a matter of reproductive justice, a correction to Florida’s “extreme abortion laws.” “Can you tell me any worries you have about it?” she asks politely when a resident seems receptive to talking.
While canvassing for Amendment 4 in an apartment complex in St. Petersburg in early October, Alexis Hobbs meets Rafael Smith, who tells her he plans to vote yes for the amendment.
Around noon, after knocking at a door on the second floor of an apartment complex, Ms. Hobbs meets Rafael Smith, a 53-year-old who works in insurance. He says that, while working as a server in college, he once lent a desperate co-worker the money for an abortion. At least she had options, he says, unlike many women in Florida now. “It shouldn’t be a choice that someone else makes.”
He also shares that he is gay, and worries that when “the government starts restricting one group’s ability to do things, it’s easier to go back and do it to another group.” He said he is voting yes on the amendment and encouraging his friends to do the same.
After Mr. Smith, Ms. Hobbs calls it a day, feeling uplifted. “That was a perfect door to end on,” she says.
Despite the rain, canvassers Matthew Grocholske and Amelia Zehnder work up and down the line at Orando’s Charli XCX-Troye Sivan concert, reminding young people to vote, and that abortion rights are on the ballot.
At the Kia Center, with Charli XCX presumably warming up inside, everyone is getting drenched, courtesy of Hurricane Milton’s opening act. Ms. Zehnder and her fellow canvasser, Matthew Grocholske, 20, are unfazed. They travel the line, collecting names and contact numbers on soggy forms so the concertgoers can receive reminders to cast their votes.
Mr. Grocholske is wearing a baseball cap with the slogan, “Everything works out in the end.” Wishful words in the current context, he acknowledges. To make them true, he says, young men have to stand up for the women they care about.
Amelia Zehnder and Matthew Grocholske manage to collect 85 pledge cards by the time the arena doors open. They will continue canvassing for Amendment 4 until election day.
Ms. Zehnder, who works at a residential mental-health and addiction treatment centre for low-income teenagers, became politically active in May after a 14-year-old client arrived several weeks pregnant. “She was 90 pounds soaking wet,” Ms. Zehnder says, and her mom, who didn’t own a car, didn’t have the means to take her out of state for an abortion. She left the centre to have the baby. Ms. Zehnder signed up to volunteer for the amendment the same day.
In canvassing conversations, Ms. Zehnder lands her argument with this line: “How insane is it that, in 2024, we have fewer rights over our bodies than our mothers?”
Young women are often surprised to hear about the current ban. For others, it’s the first time hearing about Amendment 4.
By the time the arena doors open, Ms. Zehnder and Mr. Grocholske have had dozens of conversations and collected 85 pledge cards. They score a pair of last-minute tickets in the nosebleed section and head inside, soaked but satisfied.
“Whatever the result,” Ms. Zehnder says of election day, “I can rest my head at night and know that I gave my best effort.”