DeSantis’s DePraved abortion ban

Now that the Florida Supreme Court has read the explicit right to privacy out of the state constitution to allow the ban on abortion signed by Ron DeSantis to go into effect, the situation is extremely dire. As Rachel Cohen observes, even calling it a “6 week” ban is highly misleading:

In practical terms, six weeks is a total ban. Many people do not even know they’re pregnant by then. Even if they are aware, Florida requires patients seeking abortions to complete two in-person doctor visits with a 24-hour waiting period in between, a challenging logistical burden to meet before 15 weeks and a nearly impossible one before six.

Not only will the six-week ban decimate abortion access for Florida residents, but it will also significantly curtail care for people across the South, who have been traveling to Florida from more restrictive states since Roe was overturned. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research group, there were 8,940 more abortions in Florida in 2023 compared to 2020—a 12 percent increase that researchers attribute largely to travel from out-of-state patients. Residents of Florida’s bordering states face either a total ban (Alabama) or a six-week ban (Georgia).

More broadly, the Guttmacher Institute has found that six-week bans have massive impacts on the provision of abortion. In South Carolina, the number of abortions provided in the formal health care system decreased by 71 percent the month after the state started enforcing a six-week ban on abortions in 2023. Prior research found declines of close to 50 percent in abortion caseloads in Georgia and in Texas after their six-week bans went into effect.

[…]

Florida’s law not only bans abortion after six weeks but also bans abortion by telemedicine and requires any medication abortion to be dispensed in person, which effectively outlaws mail orders of the pills. (Researchers have affirmed there is no medical need for abortion pills to be administered in the physical presence of a health care provider.) At the time it was passed, no other state had a six-week ban with a requirement for two in-person doctor visits and no option for telehealth.

While the law includes exceptions for rape and incest, it requires anyone claiming those exceptions to provide a copy of a police report, medical record, or court order — even though victims often do not involve law enforcement. The executive director of the Florida Council Against Sexual Violence has called these exceptions “meaningless” and “harmful.”

Six weeks is simply not enough time for the vast majority of people to get abortion care, especially if remote options are off the table. In medical terms, pregnancy is measured from the date of the last menstrual period, not from the date of conception, and up to 25 percent of women don’t have regular menstrual cycles, meaning a missed period wouldn’t signal anything unusual. It can take at least three weeks for a pregnancy hormone to appear on a home pregnancy test, and while blood tests can also confirm pregnancies, Florida health care professionals testified that it can take weeks to months to get an appointment with an OB-GYN, with wait times particularly long for low-income and Black Floridians.

Once a pregnancy is confirmed, a patient, under Florida law, would need to schedule an ultrasound with an abortion provider. Scheduling these appointments takes even more time. Annie Filkowski, the policy director of Florida Alliance of Planned Parenthood Affiliates, told Vox in 2023 that wait times at their clinics average about 20 days.

These barriers would prove virtually insurmountable for most people, and even harder for minors in Florida, who are required by law to either get parental consent to end a pregnancy or petition a judge to bypass their parents.

The fact that opponents of legal abortion in America uniformly believe that it should be harder for teenagers who get pregnant to obtain abortions is a good illustration of the moral universe they inhabit, and it’s not an attractive one.

Trump is refusing to explicitly endorse this ban, but the key points are that 1)the statute would not have been possibile without his judicial nominees, 2)he will sign any national abortion ban Congress puts on his desk, and 3)a further Trumpified federal judiciary is likely to unilaterally restrict access to abortion in all 50 states.