Last Thursday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation to ban abortion at just 6 weeks — before most people even know they are pregnant.
And he did it in private, behind closed doors with no media present, announcing the bill signing in an emailed news release after 11 p.m.
Why the secrecy? Because DeSantis needs this bill to reward his hard right-wing base, but he also knows it’s wildly unpopular with the independent voters he needs to win the White House.
It’s just the latest news from Florida that DeSantis would rather keep quiet — but The Intercept is committed to making sure voters get all the information they need to make an informed judgment about DeSantis as he pursues the presidency.
And our reporters are on the front lines reporting on the impact of the far-right attacks on abortion rights — as they have been since long before Roe v. Wade was overturned.
Our team is investigating DeSantis’s record, tracking down leads, and uncovering documents using Florida’s Sunshine Law — and what we’ve found so far isn’t pretty.
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The Intercept has already broken a number of unseemly stories on DeSantis, including tens of millions of dollars in state contracts handed to major DeSantis campaign donors, attacks on gender-affirming care for trans kids by Florida medical boards stacked with DeSantis appointees, and how DeSantis’s political henchmen pursued a vendetta against two county commissioners who opposed a tax break for DeSantis’s developer friends.
Meanwhile, The Intercept's Jordan Smith, an award-winning investigative journalist based in Austin, Texas, has covered the impact of abortion restrictions for years, especially in rural, low-income communities that lacked abortion access long before Roe v. Wade was overturned.
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