With only one day to spare, a Florida judge has temporarily blocked the state’s 15-week abortion ban from going into effect on Friday.
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Florida isn’t alone, a judge in Kentucky just temporarily blocked an abortion ban in that state.
And judges in Texas, Utah, and Louisiana also blocked abortions bans which were triggered by the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade last week, which established the constitutional right to an abortion.
Experts say that if this ban were to have gone forward, it would be particularly disastrous for Black Floridians, and for the thousands of pregnant people who come to the state every year seeking care.
“It’s devastating,” says Diamond Delancy, the Black organizing program manager at Planned Parenthood of South, East, and North Florida. “Before this, Florida it was kind of a safe haven.”
Delancy says that many of the patients they see at Planned Parenthood are from out of state and that for many folks, the next closest place they’ll be able to seek abortion care after 15 weeks would be North Carolina.
“When abortion rights fall in Florida and people will have to travel very far to get care,” says Jasmen Rogers with Floridians for Reproductive Freedom. “How will Black women be able to afford that? How will they be able to take two days off of work that they already don’t have?”
In Florida, about 17 percent of residents are Black, but Black folks make up roughly 35 percent of all abortion recipients in the state, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
“Attacks on abortion access, like this ban, disproportionately harm the same people who are already facing systemic barriers to care,” says Whitney Leigh White, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union who is challenging this ban. “And that includes black women and black communities.”
Like Delancy mentioned, this ban is about a lot more than just reproductive health care in Florida.
For decades, Florida has been a safe haven for abortion access because their state constitution has a stronger privacy protection than the federal level. (That’s why the ACLU and their partners brought the case under the Florida constitution).
“What we know from history, is that Floridians strongly support abortion rights and have clearly and repeatedly expressed that abortion should remain protected and accessible in Florida,” says Leigh White. “And what [the ban] does is it’s really a brazen attempt to flout that long standing history.”
But despite it’s history, Florida’s status as a safe haven for abortion care could end Friday, just as abortion bans spring up across the south in the aftermath of Roe.
“For the majority of abortion patients, who are poor or low income,” says Leigh White. “The burden and expense of traveling across multiple state lines, potentially 1000s of miles, will be significant, if not insurmountable.”
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