Florida’s voters were asked whether the state’s constitution should say that “no law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.”

A closely watched proposal to restore abortion rights in Florida appears to have fallen short, in a significant blow to efforts to expand local protections for the procedure.The ballot initiative would have allowed abortion until the point of foetal viability or about 24 weeks,

But the defeats mark the first times state-level abortion-rights campaigners have lost such a ballot campaign since the Supreme Court overturned a national right to the procedure in 2022. Florida is their most crushing loss. The proposed constitutional ...