What You Need to Know About Florida’s Abortion Access Mess
In Florida, conservative lawmakers have relentlessly attacked abortion rights. When the state’s legislative session ended in March, the most significant bill attacking abortion access—SB 476—died without getting a floor vote.
And earlier this month, the Florida Supreme Court issued two separate rulings on abortion. In one, the court upheld a 15-week abortion ban in the state and, as a result, allowed a six-week ban that Florida lawmakers passed last year to go into effect on Wednesday. The ACLU of Florida described the ruling as having “catastrophic implications.”
The other April 1 ruling gives Florida voters final say over abortion access in their state, as the court ruled in favor of a state ballot proposal that would add abortion access to the Florida Constitution. If Florida voters approve Amendment 4 and enshrine abortion rights into their state constitution, it would essentially overturn the six-week ban. The amendment will need at least a 60 percent supermajority of votes to pass.
“Florida is bracing itself for a near-total abortion ban; most people don’t even know they are pregnant at six weeks,” Laura Goodhue, Planned Parenthood of South, East, and North Florida’s vice president of public policy, told Rewire News Group after the ruling.
Dr. Cherise Felix said her visit to Washington, D.C. made her feel less alone in the fight to protect abortion access.
Still, Goodhue, who’s also executive director of the Florida Alliance of Planned Parenthood Affiliates, believes “maybe the tide is turning” against anti-abortion measures, especially considering that since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade almost two years ago, voters across the country have chosen to protect or expand abortion access every time a ballot proposal has appeared before them.
“Our hope and belief is that the voters will have the final say and stop government interference in their reproductive health choices at the ballot box in November,” Goodhue said.
Dr. Cherise Felix, an OB-GYN and abortion care provider, knows what will happen if Amendment 4 does not pass. Felix was forced to close her private practice and leave her home state of Tennessee as a result of abortion bans there. (A “trigger” law went into effect shortly after Roe’s overturn in June 2022.)
In the past, Felix said she made sure to keep her work at Planned Parenthood separate from her private practice and personal life, efforts she said were necessary for her own safety.
“When I went through a drive-through, when I stopped for gas, I tried to make sure that I didn’t have anything on me that might make me a target for violence,” Felix said. If another doctor had a patient who needed an abortion, they would not say the word abortion. The doctor would say, ‘“I have a patient in a situation. She may need to see you at your other job.’ That was the extent of it,” she said.
Felix said she lived through what she called “the worst-case scenario” in Tennessee, and wanted to be sure it didn’t happen again in Florida. That’s why she decided to be more visible in her work. In March, she attended the State of the Union as Florida Rep. Lois Frankel’s guest.
Once she got to Washington, D.C., Felix said, she realized why she was asked to come: “To bring the stories to the lawmakers so they could actually hear from frontline workers what was really happening.” Felix also met with the Democratic Women’s Caucus, joined a roundtable discussion with the Department of Health and Human Services and members of Congress. She talked about what was happening with her patients and tried to humanize abortion care.
In the meeting with the Democratic Women’s Caucus, several abortion patients who’ve been in the spotlight shared their abortion experience, including Brittany Watts, who was charged with abusing a corpse after experiencing a miscarriage; Amanda Zurawski, who was denied a medically necessary abortion in Texas; and Dr. Damla Karsan, who was Kate Cox’s doctor. (Cox was denied an abortion in Texas after being told her fetus was unlikely to survive more than a week after birth due to a fetal diagnosis of Trisomy 18; carrying the fetus to term also risked Cox’s own health and ability to have children in the future.)
Felix told lawmakers they could never create a law that would cover every situation. Those decisions belonged to doctors and patients, not the government.
“When you’re actually standing at a bedside looking at a person and telling them, ‘We have to wait for you to almost die before we can intervene,’ it doesn’t feel right at all,” Felix said. “It would be unacceptable in any other field of medicine.”
Felix said her visit to Washington, D.C. made her feel less alone in the fight to protect abortion access.
“It was such a relief to have so many politicians using the word abortion, normalizing the concept or the discussion, being able to say abortion out loud, or say abortion provider,” she said. “The State of the Union inspired me. So I have to say I’m more confident, but I’m still very, very scared about the future of abortion access in Florida.”
