Florida, it seems, is gearing up to enact a controversial resolution declaring pornography a public health risk. After appearing before the Florida House Commerce Committee on February 13, the resolution will now likely be sent to the House of Representatives for a vote early in March. If it is adopted, it’ll place Florida among the growing ranks of states to frame pornography exposure, specifically to minors, as a sort of contagious disease.

The resolution’s sponsor, Representative (and attorney general candidate) Ross Spano, originally intended to call the issue a “public health crisis,” but settled for public health “risk” in order to make it more palatable and give it a better chance of passing, the Orlando Sentinel reported. So, is there a difference between those terms, and does that matter?

“The word ‘crisis’ to me is an overstatement, and [using it] is going to get the people on the anti-pornography side called out about too much hand-wringing or inducing a moral panic,” Emily Rothman, an associate professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, told Teen Vogue. “At the same time, is it appropriate to say, ‘nothing to see here folks, giant thumbs up to pornography for kids, no problem’? That’s probably going too far in the other direction. So it’s more like, there’s a public health question worth investigating about potential impacts and about what’s worth doing as a society.”

The exact parameters of what constitutes a public health emergency are a matter of some debate. "Crisis” is generally understood to mean "a situation that is perceived as difficult" and a "time of danger," according to the World Health Organization. Rothman previously told CNN that, while there's no hard and fast definition of what constitutes a crisis, it "doesn't mean it's fair game for anybody, anywhere, to just pick up that term and start using it at will to make a political point." The notion of pornography being framed as a public health crisis has gained steam recently, with anti-pornography activist Gail Dines, a professor emeritus of women’s studies at Wheelock College, linked the concepts in a 2016 Washington Post op-ed.

Since then, a number of GOP politicians have pounced on the term and run with it. Arkansas, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Utah have all passed resolutions declaring porn a public health crisis, all citing the same concerns. The full picture of alleged consequences of porn, according to legislators in these states, are things like child trafficking and sex abuse, low self-esteem, demand for prostitution, discouraging young men from marrying, violence against women, objectification of women, infidelity, sexual activity at increasingly younger ages, and eating disorders.

“Research has found a correlation between pornography use and mental and physical illnesses, difficulty forming and maintaining intimate relationships, unhealthy brain development and cognitive function, and deviant, problematic or dangerous sexual behavior,” Spano said before an earlier committee vote according to the Orlando Sentinel.

But a review of 20 years’ worth of research published in the Journal of Sex Research on the effects of pornography on adolescents found that conclusions may have "methodological and theoretical shortcomings," and that they may be skewed by bias. Still, according to this review, porn consumption by minors correlates to an increase in casual sex, sexual aggression, and gender-stereotypical beliefs around sex.

“You can’t just overlook that these are rigorous methodologies,” Rothman said. “These are real scientists who really care. I don’t think they generated those findings because they themselves were trying to generate something negative [about pornography].”