Florida’s 6-week abortion ban takes effect amid outcry from Biden, Harris
Florida’s ban on most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, before many women even know they are pregnant, went into effect on Wednesday, with some doctors concerned that women in the state will no longer have access to needed health care.
Dr. Leah Roberts, a reproductive endocrinologist and fertility specialist with Boca Fertility in Boca Raton, said the anti-abortion laws being enacted by Florida and other red states are being written by people who don’t understand medical science.
The rules are affecting not just women who want therapeutic abortions, meaning procedures to terminate viable pregnancies because of personal choice, but also nonviable pregnancies for women who want to have babies.
“We’re coming in between them and their doctors and preventing them from getting care until it’s literally saving their lives, sometimes at the expense of their fertility,” Roberts said.
The new ban has an exception for saving a woman’s life, as well as in cases involving rape and incest. But Roberts said healthcare workers are still prevented from performing an abortion on a nonviable pregnancy that they know might become deadly — such as when the fetus is missing organs or implanted outside the uterus — until it becomes deadly.
“We’re being told that we have to wait until the mother is septic to be able to intervene,” Roberts said.
Besides the physical danger, there is also the psychological trauma of having to carry a fetus that the mother knows will never be a healthy baby, Roberts said.
The Biden campaign quickly placed blame for the “extreme” six-week ban on former U.S. president Donald Trump.
“Trump is worried the voters will hold him accountable for the cruelty and chaos he created. He’s right. Trump ripped away the rights and freedom of women in America. This November, voters are going to teach him a valuable lesson: Don’t mess with the women of America,” President Joe Biden said in a statement about the new abortion ban.
Vice-President Kamala Harris also criticized the six-week ban on abortions during an event Wednesday in Jacksonville.
“Because of Donald Trump, more than 20 states have abortion bans,” Harris said.
“And today, this very day, at the stroke of midnight, another Trump abortion ban went into effect here in Florida. As of this morning, four million women in this state woke up with fewer reproductive freedoms than they had last night.”
Roberts said she is concerned the restrictions will also prompt veteran doctors to leave Florida, as they have in other states that have enacted abortion bans.
“We’re going to have less access to care for our general population, she said.
In addition, women are going to have to travel to another state for an abortion. The closest place before 12 weeks would be North Carolina.