‘This is life and death’: in a Florida clinic after the six-week abortion ban
Rose hadn’t even missed her period when the thought occurred to her, “I need to take a test.”
The Florida resident, who has two children, had given birth just three months ago. She thought she and her husband were being careful. But the pregnancy test confirmed her suspicions: she was pregnant and she didn’t want that, she realized.
“It would just be a huge financial, physical and emotional burden,” said Rose, who asked not to be identified by a nickname. Her last two pregnancies were extremely difficult and she feared for her health. She wants to become a tattoo artist, but is not currently working. Her husband only recently started a new job. Rose continued, “I want to start a career and go to school and learn new things, and it’s a lot harder with more kids. With the children I have, it is already more difficult.”
By the time she took a pregnancy test, Rose estimates she was perhaps four weeks pregnant. She was lucky: many people don’t realize they are pregnant so early. Rose also moved quickly to make an appointment at an abortion clinic in Florida. Yet on Tuesday, as Rose sat in a dimly lit room decorated with butterfly collages and a doctor pressed a white pill into her hand to initiate a medication abortion, she was already six weeks and four days pregnant.
If Rose had arrived at the clinic a day later, she would not have been able to have an abortion in Florida. On Wednesday, Florida banned abortion after six weeks of pregnancy.
“There’s still a lot that I can do at my age, and that I want to do at my age, that I won’t really get the chance to do if I stay pregnant and have more children,” she said. .
Roos is 19 years old.
For nearly two years after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, Florida was the last bastion of abortion access in the US Deep South. Although the state had a 15-week abortion ban, providers there performed more than 84,000 abortions in 2023, including nearly 9,000 on out-of-state patients. But on April 1, the Florida Supreme Court ruled to uphold the 15-week ban — and thanks to legislative maneuvering by Florida’s Republican-controlled state legislature, that decision paved the way for the six-week ban that went into effect Wednesday.
The impact of the ban will spread throughout the US. Women who have already passed the six-week mark — about 60% of abortions in Florida occur after that point in pregnancy — will have to travel several states for abortions at the very least, leaving the relatively few abortion clinics that survived the fall of Roe further charged. Women who cannot afford to travel can arrange their own abortion, a process that, if undertaken early enough in pregnancy, is medically safe but legally fraught.
Women may also be forced to remain pregnant against their will.
On Tuesday, the last day before the ban took effect, the phone rang off the hook at the abortion clinic that performed Rose’s abortion, the Bread and Roses Women’s Health Center in swampy Gainesville, Florida. A squat almost hidden behind a lush wall of ivy. The walls of Bread and Roses are decorated with butterfly motifs and motivational posters. A small, framed poster featured an American flag in the shape of a womb with the stark word: “vote.”
Bread and Roses normally sees somewhere between 20 and 30 patients a day, but in April, as the ban approached, the clinic added extra hours and started seeing almost 40 patients a day. In a desperate attempt to get as many patients in as possible on Tuesday, staff barely had time to even eat. The doctor who performed abortions kept trying to heat up her pasta lunch, but was repeatedly interrupted. Kristin, the clinic director, gave a toast but was pulled away to do ultrasounds; by the time she remembered to return to it hours later, the bread had hardened into a hockey puck. (Kristin asked to be identified by her first name due to security concerns.)
Nearly every phone call seemed to contain some version of the same conversation, as clinic staff asked potential patients: Do you know about the six-week abortion ban? When was your last menstrual period? Do you think you are less than six weeks along?
If a caller appeared to have exceeded that limit, staff members directed him to resources to help him find an abortion clinic in another state. A woman pregnant from her husband’s repeated sexual assaults cried on the phone Wednesday when an employee told her she probably wouldn’t be able to get an abortion in Florida. The woman, who lived in a state with a near-total abortion ban, was confused by Florida’s ban and overwhelmed by the difficulty of having to travel even further than she had imagined.
“This law changes everything,” a Bread and Roses employee told another stunned caller. “If you are older than six weeks, we simply cannot proceed with an abortion.
“It’s terrible,” the employee added. “It’s not fair at all.”
Yet another woman who called Bread and Roses on Wednesday had accidentally gone to a crisis pregnancy center, an anti-abortion center that aims to convince people to continue their pregnancies. They are often close enough to abortion clinics to confuse people. (A similar facility was just two doors down from Bread and Roses.) People at the crisis pregnancy center told the woman that taking abortion pills could cause her to give birth in the toilet, according to a Bread and Roses employee, who fumed used to be. through pure disinformation. How could this be legal, but an abortion after six weeks is not?
Complicating matters further is the fact that Florida also requires patients to go to an abortion clinic for a consultation at least 24 hours before actually receiving the procedure or pills. This restriction means that it takes even less time for women to realize they are pregnant, realize they want an abortion and go to a clinic.
Floridians who are six weeks pregnant may need to venture to clinics in states like New Mexico, Kansas and Illinois. North Carolina is a better option for many Floridians, but that state only allows abortions up to 12 weeks of pregnancy and the waiting period is even more onerous than Florida’s. It requires people to come to a clinic for an initial consultation at least 72 hours before their abortion.
One patient at Bread and Roses on Tuesday, who asked to be identified by her initial A, was just over five weeks pregnant. A, a new mother with a one-month-old baby, had always been against abortion, but during her last pregnancy she had developed heart failure. About a week after giving birth, she had a seizure.
“After my condition after my last pregnancy, I realized that it is something people should have the right to if they need it,” A said of abortion. “I believe women should have the right to their bodies. I honestly think it’s cruel to people with health problems like me.”
A, who is not currently working, did not know what she would do if she had not been able to get an abortion in Florida. With a sigh, she suggested, “I would have been stressed and delivered the baby.”
Rose already knows what it’s like to be denied an abortion. When she became pregnant with her son at age 16, she considered having an abortion, but her deeply conservative mother refused to let her have one, she said. Subsequently, due to an injury sustained at birth, Rose’s son was born with severe disabilities.
“I was a 17-year-old kid taking care of a severely disabled child,” Rose said. “I love my son very much. I have no regrets about him.”
But she added: “It’s not okay to force someone to do that with their body.”
Most minors involve their parents in their decision to have an abortion, but minors in Florida who cannot or do not want to do so must instead go to court to convince a judge that they are mature enough to have an abortion. to undergo an abortion. (The standard assumption is that they are mature enough to give birth.) Their victory is far from guaranteed: In the two years before Roe’s death, Florida judges rejected more than 12% of the more than 200 requests from minors. Even if a minor is successful, the legal process can take days, if not weeks.
Under a six-week ban, minors are unlikely to be able to overcome these legal hurdles in time. But even if they can get a parent’s consent for an abortion, minors are especially likely to be denied one under Florida’s six-week ban. Two out of three 15 to 19 year olds realize they are pregnant after six weeks.
Because Bread and Roses employees gave priority to patients who appeared to be less than six weeks pregnant, all patients who came for a consultation on Tuesday could legally have an abortion by Wednesday. But on Wednesday the clinic had to tell three or four people that they were over Florida’s legal limit, according to the doctor who performed abortions on Wednesday.
The clinic did not keep track of how many people called, but it appeared the six-week limit had already been exceeded. Kristin, the clinic director, estimated that about half of the callers could not be scheduled.
Kristin suspects that Bread and Roses will have to pull back even more in the coming days. Because the ban made so much headlines in April, she thinks people are paying more attention than usual to their periods and pregnancies; if the ban falls outside the headlines, people may forget about it until it’s too late. On Wednesday afternoon, Kristin sat in the clinic parking lot, dressed in black scrubs, and pulled her knees up to her chest.
“I feel exhausted today. I feel incredibly sad and angry. I’m so angry,” Kristin said. “I’m so naive. I want to think that people have the best intentions and that this law is so harmful. I don’t understand how anyone can’t see how harmful this law is. For some people this is life and death.
“In my heart of hearts I don’t understand,” she repeated.
There is a glimmer of hope for Bread and Roses employees: In November, Florida will vote on a ballot measure that would enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution, making the six-week ban unconstitutional. Similar measures have already prevailed in states across the country, including Republican strongholds like Kansas and Ohio.
In particular, ballot measures in increasingly red Florida must receive 60% of the vote to pass. Even if abortion rights advocates win in November, Florida’s abortion laws wouldn’t officially change until January. Floridians will have to live under the six-week ban for months.
Clinics may also not survive the ban. Unable to perform most abortions, they face a devastating financial blow – but it is impossible to map the exact radius of the blast.
“How do you plan it if you don’t know what to expect?” Kristin said. ‘We’ll be fine. We are not closing. We’ll figure it out.”
Like many other patients at Bread and Roses, Rose had never heard of the ballot measure before her abortion appointment. She is not registered to vote, but she wants to vote for the ballot measure.
According to her, the six-week ban is “bad”.
“Florida, along with the United States, is going downhill,” Rose said. “I used to enjoy living here, but I plan to move as soon as possible.”