January 6, 2025
Hayden Haddock is a William Wilberforce Fellow and a senior at the University of South Alabama.
As a part of the National Leaders Collective (NLC), I, along with my group, Jags for Life, completed two projects in the fall semester, and not just for a good grade, but to save lives.
Even though there were many ways to advocate for life this November thanks to extreme abortion ballot initiatives, fortunately Alabama is one of the most pro-life states in America. However, nearby in Florida, Amendment 4, a law that if passed would have overturned the six-week heartbeat protections and killed hundreds of thousands of preborn Floridians per year. Florida’s life-saving haven would’ve become an abortion mill haven for the southeast.
Only living a little over an hour drive from Pensacola, we decided to go there on Oct.19, 2024 and engage with Florida voters directly. We had 10 Students for Life of America (SFLA) groups Making sure to stay on public property, we split up between the boardwalk, the main shopping center, the sidewalk in front of the local restaurants, and the beach. We experienced a relatively warm welcome, which is not very surprising in the Florida panhandle, but it was still good for us to experience. We one person said that he was voting “yes” on Amendment 4 and the boardwalk manager wanted us to leave acknowledged he legally could not make us since weren’t soliciting
Overall, we had conversations with mostly younger voters, and even the self-identified pro-abortion voters said that Amendment 4 was too extreme for them to vote in favor. Most voters had no idea how horrifying this proposed initiative was. When we asked them to explain what they knew about it, we added any information that they may have missed out on, including language of the amendment that would allow non-medical professionals to perform abortions and taking away parental consent for minors seeking abortions. This was understandably horrifying to nearly every voter that we spoke to, and it encouraged people to vote who were not originally going to do so. Before leaving, we handed them information cards provided by SFLA and asked them to take extras to give to their families. We left Pensacola after our successful five-hour activism trip, estimating at least 250 conversations.
Amendment 4 failed in Florida, with 42.8% voting “no” and only 57.2% voting “yes,” meaning that pro-abortion supporters didn’t reach the necessary 60% threshold. In Escambia County, the home of Pensacola which is typically center-right, 51.8% voted “no” and 48.2% voted “yes.” Our time in Florida taught us that even the most abortion minded people weren’t not abortion extremism up until the moment of birth and that people were willing to mobilize themselves and their families to vote against the murder of innocent children.
If you’re a pro-life advocate, never feel like you have to be limited to just your resident state. For us, it was just as meaningful to help a neighboring state such as Florida, because every baby deserves a chance at life.