Abortions dropped after Florida’s six-week ban started, but not as much as neighboring states

The number of clinician-provided abortions in Florida dropped by 30 percent in May after a six-week abortion ban law took effect, according to new data, greatly reducing the state’s role as a destination for people seeking abortion care.

The decline was substantial but not nearly as much as in other neighboring states like Alabama or Georgia when they enacted abortion bans, the new analysis from the Guttmacher Institute found.

It likely reflects reductions in access to abortion for Florida residents as well as people from neighboring states with abortion bans who would have traveled to Florida for abortion care.

The findings suggest that the existing infrastructure of abortion funds and support organizations in Florida was ready to match patients to abortion services within the legal time frame.

“The fact that the drop was not steeper, I think, really speaks to the ways in which people and organizations have been going to really great lengths to get people access to care, both providers and also these kinds of organizations that are helping people access funding, helping people match to clinics with appointment availability,” Guttmacher data scientist Isaac Maddow-Zimet said.

When abortion bans took effect elsewhere, the impact was more severe. Texas saw about a 50 percent decline when its “heartbeat” ban took effect in September 2021 — even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

Abortions dropped about 45 percent in Georgia after its six-week law took effect in November 2022, and they dropped by nearly 80 percent in South Carolina with its six-week ban.

The survey is based on data on procedural and medication abortions provided at brick-and-mortar health facilities (such as clinics or doctor’s offices), as well as medication abortions provided via telehealth and virtual providers in the United States.

In the first three months of 2024, there were approximately 8,050 clinician-provided abortions per month in Florida. After the ban went into effect May 1, that number dropped to an estimated 5,630 in May and 5,200 in June.

The drop followed a large increase in April, as providers and patients prepared for the looming law to take effect. Florida’s Supreme Court upheld a 15-week abortion ban on April 1, triggering the six-week ban to start May 1.

In April, clinicians provided around 9,730 abortions, 21 percent more than the monthly average for the first three months of the year.

While there can be seasonal patterns in abortion counts, other states around the country did not experience the sharp increase in April or subsequent steep declines that occurred in Florida.

The restrictions in Florida have reverberated across the entire region, as the state had been a destination for people seeking abortions while neighboring states cracked down.

In 2023, about 9,000 people traveled from out of state to receive an abortion in Florida, according to Guttmacher estimates.

The report points to data from Planned Parenthood in Florida as showing the “disparate impact of the six-week abortion ban on patients traveling from out of state,” noting that clinics saw a 80 percent drop in out-of-state patients in May 2024 compared to May 2023.

Now, the closest options for Florida residents who need in-clinic abortion care after six weeks are several states away and subject to their own sets of restrictions. According to Guttmacher estimates, the average one-way distance a Florida resident who is more than six weeks pregnant needs to travel to an abortion clinic is around 590 miles to North Carolina.

Even then, North Carolina bans abortion after 12 weeks and has a 72-hour waiting period after a patient makes an in-person appointment before an abortion can proceed.

But the financial support that helped to partially overcome Florida’s abortion barriers may not be sustainable, Maddow-Zimet said.

“The costs and the demand are really just going up,” he said.

A lot of abortion funds saw large spikes in donations immediately following the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe, but they have not been sustained even as the demand has increased and people are traveling greater distances.

Even among Florida residents, “the number of people who need access to care just requires a lot of resources on the part of funds. It also requires a lot of resources on the part of clinics,” which may have difficulty keeping their doors open, Maddow-Zimet said.

Florida is also one of at least nine states where voters in November will have the chance to decide the future of abortion access through ballot measures.

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