Florida’s 6-week abortion ban will have scary, tragic consequences

On May 1, Florida’s six-week abortion ban officially took effect.

On May 2, almost two years since the 15-week ban launched a wave of suffering across Florida, our government decided it made political sense to clarify the vague medical “exceptions” that the ban cited.

As the director of patient experience for Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida, I want to explain just how little these so-called exceptions mean in reality.

First, we know they don’t work. If you don’t believe that, just look at the extensive research done by independent, data-based organizations like KFF, which noted in a May 2023 report that “in practice, health and life exceptions to bans have often proven to be unworkable.”

Second, if our state government or the Agency for Health Care Administration – the office tasked with protecting the health of Floridians – were truly concerned about the safety and well-being of pregnant people, they would have released these rules with the 15-week ban. It wouldn’t take two years of pain and needless death for them to finally decide we need “emergency rules” – and especially “emergency rules” that don’t actually tell us anything.

This is not about patients; this is about politicians trying to protect their jobs during an election year.

Not everyone can understand what the decision to end a pregnancy means. Not everyone has held a patient’s hand as they mourned the child they have lost or wept for the future that was taken from them.

We have patients who sell everything they have, drive through the night and are there waiting when our doors open. We have patients who are so desperate that they arrive without a place to sleep, without money for food and without a plan for how to get home.

I have also talked to patients crying on the phone explaining that they might die without abortion care, but they can’t find anyone who is willing to treat them. This isn’t as rare as you might think, and it’s about to become much more common.

For example, consider the patient who we saw – at eight weeks gestation – just before the six-week ban went into place. She had already had three high-risk pregnancies. With each pregnancy, she had to deliver earlier and earlier because of the recurring, increasingly life-threatening preeclampsia that developed with each. She knew she needed an abortion because her body couldn’t take the toll of another pregnancy. And she knew that she needed to make sure she could still be there to raise her three children at home. But because she was seen so early in her pregnancy, as demanded by the 15-week ban, she was still healthy.

If Florida’s six-week ban had been in place at that point, no doctor in the state would have been able to care for her.

I have two girls, and this isn’t the world I want for them – or for anyone else. I don’t want either of my daughters to be on an examination table begging for a doctor to save their life, only to be told: “I’m sorry, Senator So-and-so said I can’t help you until you’re closer to death.”

If my words appear angry, it’s because I am angry. If my words appear to be those of frustration, it’s because I am frustrated. I am very scared – for my daughters and for every other Floridian whose life is now threatened by this abortion ban.

If you’re as angry, frustrated and scared as I am, please vote for Amendment 4 in November so we can finally take back control of our own bodies. And if you aren’t as angry, frustrated and scared as I am, you just aren’t paying enough attention.

Luz Ayala is the director of patient experience for Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida.