Florida's 6-week abortion ban takes effect as doctors worry women will lose access to health care

BOCA RATON, Fla. (AP) — Florida's ban on most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, before many women even know they are pregnant, went into effect Wednesday, and some doctors are concerned that women in the state will no longer have access to needed health care.

The start of the new ban also brought Vice President Kamala Harris to Jacksonville, where she said the abortion ban is a direct result of former President Donald Trump appointing three of the six U.S. Supreme Court justices who voted nearly two years ago to overturn the longstanding precedent that protected abortion access.

“And now, in states across our nation, extremists have proposed and passed laws that criminalize doctors, punish women,” Harris said. “Laws that threaten doctors and nurses with prison time, even for life, simply for providing reproductive care. Laws that make no exception for rape

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 vaguely 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 health care workers are still prevented from performing an abortion on a nonviable pregnancy that they know may become deadly — such as when the fetus is missing organs or implanted outside the uterus — until it actually 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.


“They’re feeling the kicks for months after they’re being told that they’re never going to have a live birth," Roberts said. “And it’s just horrifying when you could take care of it at 20 weeks, and they could move on, and they could get pregnant with their next pregnancy and be able to hold their babies much sooner.”

The Biden campaign quickly placed blame for the “extreme” six-week ban on former 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.

During her Jacksonville speech, Harris said November's election is about the fundamental freedom to make decisions about one’s own body and not have their government tell women what they are supposed to do.

“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, 4 million women in this state woke up with fewer reproductive freedoms than they had last night."

Roberts said a huge issue with the ban is that the doctors who perform emergency abortions have to learn the procedures by performing therapeutic abortions. So if most abortions are banned, the next generation of doctors won't be able to develop the skills needed to perform an emergency abortion.

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.