Florida Republicans Just Wrecked Abortion Access for the Whole South

Florida’s new abortion ban went into effect on Wednesday, terminating access to the medical procedure past six weeks of pregnancy—and wiping out access for much of the southeastern United States.

The new law will prohibit abortion well before a lot of people even realize they’re pregnant, and just one week before drugstore pregnancy tests can detect pregnancy hormones in their earliest, and least reliable, window. The restriction will force patients in need of the procedure to seek treatment in North Carolina, where abortion is banned after 12 weeks, or even further.

Governor Ron DeSantis pushed the law through in April 2023 while campaigning for president, despite dissent from within the state. The move was viewed as something that could prove popular with some voters in swing states such as Iowa, but DeSantis’s presidential bid fell apart when he announced in January that he would be withdrawing from the race—and left Florida holding the bag.

“This is the biggest change to the abortion access landscape since Roe was overturned,” Stephanie Loraine Piñeiro, executive director of Florida Access Network, told The New Republic’s Melissa Gira Grant. “This is being done to further decimate the abortion access landscape in a way that you can’t come back from.”

Prior to the ban, Florida allowed abortion up to 15 weeks, making the state a haven for people seeking the medical procedure in the South. The six-week ban passed alongside similarly restrictive bans in neighboring states, meaning that now, abortion access throughout the entire region has been crippled.

Backlash to Florida’s new law has been extreme, with more than a million Floridians signing a petition to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution and putting abortion rights on the ballot in November. That initiative, known as Amendment Four, would protect abortion until “fetal viability” at approximately 24 weeks. Still, a possible win in the second half of the year will come “on the backs” of people who will have to suffer now, giving birth “when they didn’t want to,” executive director of the Chicago Abortion Fund Megan Jeyifo told NPR.