Abortion rights advocates speak out after oral arguments at the Florida Supreme Court on abortion bans and the state’s privacy clause. Sept. 8, 2023. (Photo by Mitch Perry/Florida Phoenix)
“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” – Simone de Beauvoir
It’s not too far-fetched to look at the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2022 evisceration of Roe v. Wade as the canary in the coal mine. The high court’s reversal of this long-established legal precedent has roiled the lives and livelihoods of more than half America’s population.
Since the ruling, far-right Republican policymakers have relentlessly peeled away what was thought to be an unalienable constitutional right for America’s women. These actions by Republican-led legislatures in at least 26 states have shattered the lives of childbearing-age women and their families in these states.
In Florida, May 1, 2024, is remembered as the day that Gov. Ron DeSantis’ six-week abortion ban went into effect. Despite a robust struggle to blunt the effort, supporters of reproductive healthcare and access to abortion fell short when that year’s ballot amendment failed to reach the required 60%.
In the aftermath, millions of Florida women had their reproductive healthcare protections snatched away.
Even with this victory, DeSantis and the anti-abortion lobby continue to push against as many legal, political, and constitutional boundaries as they can while challenging, ignoring, or defying courts that try to rein them in.
Florida’s six-week ban is creating insurmountable barriers to abortion care for many patients. Clinicians describe how the unworkability of the ban’s narrow exceptions and the “severe chilling effect on abortion provision caused by the sweeping criminalization of abortion from a very early stage of pregnancy are endangering patients’ health and survival and impairing clinicians’ ability to comply with their ethical obligations and medical standards of care,” according to a report by Physicians for Human Rights.
The Florida ban replaced a 15-week ban instituted a month after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. “Anyone who performs or participates in the termination of a pregnancy faces a third-degree felony charge and up to five years in prison,” the report reads. “Unlike other states, Florida’s ban does not clearly exempt pregnant people themselves from prosecution.”
While the law includes exceptions in cases of preterm rupture of membranes, gestational tumors, and ectopic pregnancies, the guidelines “lack medical clarity, further confusing clinicians,” the physicians group explained.
Baptist News Global, in an alarming October 2024 article, warned that women were dying because of vague abortion laws. These deaths are exceptionally difficult to document because lawmakers have purposely chosen not to chronicle or make publicly available such information, but there are stories in Florida, Texas, Indiana, and elsewhere detailing the human costs of this onerous law.
Doctors “described the serious and manifold harms the ban is causing pregnant people in the state who seek reproductive health care,” the article reported.
“The six-week ban is unclear in its guidelines and introduces barriers to care, delays in emergency reproductive services, and deviations from standard medical care. Moreover, the steep penalties, particularly when combined with other laws, create intensified fear and confusion among healthcare providers who do not know in what cases they legally can or cannot provide abortion care, creating strain in the patient-clinician relationship and inducing providers and trainees to leave the state.”
Health experts say Florida’s abortion restrictions, particularly the six-week ban, create significant health, economic, and social harm, especially for women facing barriers to essential care, increased health risks (especially for maternal mortality), financial setbacks (lost wages or education), and mental health concerns like anxiety and depression.
Yet bans prevent adequate access to care while placing barriers to timely medical care even for miscarriages or life-threatening situations.
‘Nightmare’
The abortion ban is forcing Florida women to travel out of state for care and delay vital medical treatment, and imposes severe economic hardships on them, limiting education and workforce participation. These disproportionately affect Black women and survivors of sexual violence, who face complex proof requirements for exceptions. These restrictions increase unwanted pregnancies, leading to more poverty and harm to families, despite research showing that access to abortion improves women’s economic stability and well-being.
According to Reproduction Justice For All, “2025 affirmed critical truths that will be at the forefront of our fight in 2026 — voters continue to reject abortion bans and support reproductive freedom champions at the ballot box; anti-abortion actors are escalating, not retreating, despite their proven unpopularity; and the human cost of abortion bans is mounting while the full damage is still untold.”
And as the country moves into a new year, the Republican war against women shows no sign of abating.
Twenty-five years since the FDA approved mifepristone — which has been rigorously studied and used safely by more than 7.5 million people — Trump and his MAGA allies are using every branch and level of government, including the courts, Congress, and administrative agencies like the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services, to block access to mifepristone. Meanwhile, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley introduced a bill in the Senate to ban the mailing of mifepristone. House Republicans have introduced similar legislation.
Reproductive justice advocate Jessica Valenti characterized the effect of the anti-abortion crusade as “a nightmare.”
“[T]his impact isn’t only going to be felt in Florida, but across the South,” she wrote in her newsletter in April 2024, after the Florida Supreme Court upheld the six-week abortion ban.
“Florida abortion clinics have been preparing” for the outcome, Valenti wrote, noting that groups like Planned Parenthood of South, East, and North Florida, for example, had “been strengthening their partnerships with providers in pro-choice states so they can refer people elsewhere.”
Earthquakes
Abortion and the reproductive justice providers made sure that there were all “the right people in place with scheduling, making sure we can fit as many patients in as possible. Education is the biggest part really, just making sure Floridians are educated about what’s about to happen come May 1,” when the six-week ban took effect.
Reproductive justice advocates and other experts have likened the Florida and Arizona abortion bans to earthquakes that have significantly altered America’s abortion landscape. But that has not caused them to run away from the challenge. Valenti, Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and a phalanx of activists are fighting back, using a variety of methods to blunt this anti-woman assault.
The methods vary: legal challenges, legislative advocacy, funding for abortion access, and direct action to protect clinics. Key strategies include supporting these organizations, funding patient travel and care, establishing buffer zones to prevent harassment, and passing state-level protections for reproductive rights.
For reproductive justice advocates, this fight is far from over, as abortion opponents — aided and abetted by Trump, Republican members of Congress, and state legislators — continue to rachet up the stakes.
Ms. Magazine encapsulates what American women face with the next prong of MAGA control of women: Project 2026, an extension of Project 2025 described as a group of people bent on reducing “the supply and demand for abortion at all stages.”
“Project 2026 lays out a government redesigned to control women’s bodies, erase LGBTQ+ lives, dismantle civil rights protections and roll back decades of hard-won progress. Wrapped in the language of ‘family,’ ‘sovereignty’ and ‘restoring America,’ it is a direct attempt to impose a narrow, rigid ideology on an entire nation,” the magazine wrote.
“Make no mistake: This is a plan for forced motherhood, government-policed gender and the end of women’s equality as we know it,” the article continues. “[We] know exactly what this means. A country where a woman’s future is no longer her own.”