Florida’s 6-week abortion ban set to take effect this week

A stricter abortion law is set to take effect in Florida on Wednesday — dropping the state’s 15-week ban to a six-week ban — and it will likely affect thousands of people seeking abortion care within the first month alone.

Florida has become a key abortion access point amid widespread restrictions that have taken hold in the region in the two years since the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade. It’s also one of the country’s most populous states.

Last year, 1 of every 3 abortions in the South — and about 1 in every 12 nationwide — happened in Florida, according to data from the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization focused on sexual and reproductive health that supports abortion rights. In 2023, there were about 7,000 abortions in Florida each month, and more than 9,000 people traveled from other states to get an abortion in Florida throughout the year, the data shows.

Many women don’t know that they’re pregnant https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/09/health/pregnancy-at-six-weeks/index.html after their last menstrual period, and other states that have enacted laws with this early gestation limit saw significant cuts to abortion care. In Texas, the number of abortions provided within the formal health-care system dropped by about half after a six-week abortion ban took effect in 2021, and there were thousands more births than expected in the following year. In South Carolina, there was a 70% decrease in abortions just one month after the state enforced a six-week limit.

homesweethomeMrL,

Hows it goin Florida

Drusas,

I wish the media was more on top of explaining to people what "X weeks pregnant" means. Especially in these cases where were taking about "six weeks pregnant".

It does not mean that you have been pregnant for 6 weeks. It means that you last menstruated 6 weeks prior. If you have an irregular period, it's possible that you could have been pregnant for only a few days at that point (though more likely that you have been pregnant for at least two weeks).

These short time spans deliberately make it impossible for many women to get an abortion, even if they're very on top of it.

disguy_ovahea,

The Florida Supreme Court put state constitutionalized abortion rights on this November’s ballot. The same goes for New York and Maryland. Vote for your rights in November!

valkyre09,

My wife and I lost our baby at around 10-12 weeks. There was some sort of medical reason my wife needed a d&c due to excessive blood loss.

Is that life saving treatment also banned under those new laws? If so, it seems even more barbaric.

mipadaitu,

Very sorry to hear that, it’s always a difficult thing to go through.

The issue is currently being argued in the supreme court. A lot of states have extremely vague laws, or don’t have exceptions for cases like this, and doctors and hospitals are struggling to make decisions until it’s too late. Many people that can afford it are resorting to traveling for pre-natal healthcare for exactly this reason.

valkyre09,

Absolutely wild. My heart breaks for the people who are already experiencing the worst days of their lives, made worse by people who have no business making medical decisions for them.

xmunk,

First off, I’m sorry for what you went through.

There is a large issue with laws like these, they often contain grandiose statements and vagaries that make it difficult for physicians to know what’s legal and what isn’t. So a lot of the difficulty in laws like this is that Doctors don’t know specifically what is and isn’t illegal and may be afraid to execute procedures that may be legal by the letter of the law out of fear from over zealous prosecutors.

atomicorange,

Maybe? Found this in an NPR article:

The six-week ban will allow exceptions for rape, incest and human trafficking up until 15 weeks of pregnancy. It also includes exceptions for fatal fetal abnormalities. And like the current 15-week ban, it will allow abortion in order to save the life of the pregnant person.

So you’d just need to find a doctor willing to say she’d die without it. In practice these kinds of exceptions put doctors at risk, so they may be more unwilling to perform abortions in “borderline” cases. They might have opted for some other treatments until your wife got “bad enough” to justify the d&c.

I’m really sorry for your loss, I’m glad the doctors were able to treat your wife promptly and she didn’t have to suffer through the pain and delay many women in Florida will have to endure in the coming years.

BolexForSoup, (edited )
BolexForSoup avatar

year, 1 of every 3 abortions in the South — and about 1 in every 12 nationwide — happened in Florida,

1 in ~16 Americans live in Florida (22.3mill state pop out of 333mill nation pop) so while that’s not parity and the number of abortions is higher than their population relative to the US, “1 in 12 nationwide” needs to be contextualized by the fact that it is the third most populous state in the union.

I probably don’t even need to look at the numbers for the south tbh. With some states basically having functional bans I’m sure Florida does an outsized number for the region, so this six week ban will be yet another massive problem for women here.

edit: grammar/syntax

Ekybio,
@Ekybio@lemmy.world avatar

First the removal of children from the CHIP programm and now this

I love to be reminded why having republicans in power is danger to humanity…

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