Story originally published in Common Dreams.
“Florida has been a critical haven for abortion access in the South, and this ban will decimate abortion access for Floridians and the entire region,” one group said after the governor’s signature.
After Florida’s GOP governor on Thursday signed a 15-week abortion ban inspired by a contested Mississippi law that could soon reverse Roe v. Wade, pro-choice advocates warned of impacts across the region, given that the Sunshine State has long been “an oasis of reproductive care in the South.”
With Gov. Ron DeSantis’ support, Florida’s law is set to take effect this summer. His signature came after Republican state legislators in Kentucky on Wednesday overrode their Democratic governor’s veto of a similar bill and GOP Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt on Tuesday signed a near-total abortion ban.
In a tweet about the recent developments, the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute said the latest state-level bans “not only violate the rights and autonomy of people seeking essential care, but will devastate abortion access across large parts of the nation.”
The Center for Reproductive Rights—which is helping challenge the Mississippi law—similarly pointed out that “Florida has been a critical haven for abortion access in the South, and this ban will decimate abortion access for Floridians and the entire region.”Florida “allows abortions up to 24 weeks, the limit defined in the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade,” HuffPost explained as the measure moved through the Legislature earlier this year. “For hundreds of miles, other states have much more restrictive policies—if you headed west from Florida, you’d have to go all the way through the deep South and Texas to New Mexico to find a similar level of reproductive care and accessibility.”
Read the rest of the story in Common Dreams