Conservatives have long criticized a 1989 Florida Supreme Court ruling that set an initial precedent about the privacy clause protecting abortion rights. The battle over the 15-week law is playing out after the U.S. Supreme Court in June overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion-rights decision.

Moody's office will not file a full brief until late March. But in a court document last year, the state's lawyers cited last year's U.S. Supreme Court ruling, in a case known as Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, to try to bolster arguments in support of the 15-week limit.

"To begin, this (Florida Supreme) Court is likely to hold that the privacy clause of the Florida Constitution does not limit the Legislature from regulating abortion," Moody's office argued in the document. "As the U.S. Supreme Court recently explained in overruling Roe v. Wade, a right to abortion is not contained in any of the 'broadly framed' rights the U.S. Supreme Court's pre-Roe precedents had established—whether framed as a 'right to privacy,' or as a 'freedom to make 'intimate and personal choices' that are 'central to personal dignity and autonomy.' That reasoning obliterates the foundation of this (Florida Supreme) Court's own abortion precedents, which heavily relied on the now-abrogated Roe v. Wade and its progeny in establishing a right to abortion under the Florida Constitution."

But in the brief Monday, attorneys for the plaintiffs disputed such arguments. The brief also said Florida voters approved the privacy clause in 1980 and rejected a proposed 2012 constitutional amendment that would have prevented the state Constitution from being interpreted to "create broader rights to an abortion than those contained in the United States Constitution."

"The U.S. Supreme Court's Dobbs decision overruling an implicit, federal constitutional right to abortion in no way undermines this (Florida Supreme) Court's precedents interpreting Florida's explicit privacy clause—a broad, freestanding protection with no equivalent in the federal Constitution and rooted in a completely different historical context," the brief said. "To the contrary, the Dobbs opinion expressly recognized that states remain free to protect abortion under state law. Floridians have twice exercised their sovereign prerogative to do just that: in 1980, when they adopted strong, independent protections for privacy rights, including abortion, under the state Constitution; and in 2012, when they voted against a proposal that would have weakened state abortion protections to be no greater than those under federal law."

A decision by the Florida court is months away. But the outcome of the case could help determine whether DeSantis and Republican lawmakers try to place additional restrictions on abortions in the future.

The state court has become significantly more conservative since DeSantis took office in early 2019. Three longtime justices who consistently ruled in favor of abortion rights, Barbara Pariente, R. Fred Lewis and Peggy Quince, left the court in 2019 because of a mandatory retirement age and were replaced by DeSantis appointees. Another DeSantis appointee, Renatha Francis, joined the seven-member court last year.