Florida’s Six-Week Abortion Ban Will Devastate Access in the South

Florida—a state with the third largest population in the U.S. and the second largest abortion provider in the U.S.—has recently allowed a state Supreme Court decision that will ban abortion after six weeks gestation. Lauren Brenzel, Campaign Director with Floridians Protecting Freedom sits down to talk with us about the inner workings of this case and how it will further impact abortion access for those in the state and across the country.

After this policy goes into effect on May 1st, 2024, patients in Florida (who can) will likely have to travel as far as New York and Illinois to receive abortion care. Florida’s Supreme Court decision follows up years of challenging legislative sessions that have dismantled public education, banned sex education, and prevented the expansion of Medicaid. A ballot initiative has been introduced that may remove the Supreme Court ruling in November. If you’d like to learn more about reproductive justice and voting rights, check out our past podcast episode here.

Links from this episode

Floridians Protecting Freedom on X
Floridians Protecting Freedom on Facebook
Florida Access Network
Tampa Bay Abortion Fund
Florida Planned Parenthood

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Transcript

Jennie: Welcome to rePROs Fight Back, a podcast on all things related to sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice. [music intro]

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Hi, rePROs! How's everybody doing? I'm your host Jennie Wetter, and my pronouns are she/her. So y'all, I have really been enjoying this gorgeous spring weather in DC. I've been enjoying taking walks and seeing all the flowers coming out. I mean, my allergies enjoy them a little less than I do, but I've been enjoying it. I've been especially enjoying seeing all the various cherry blossoms in DC. You know, the ones that are on the tidal basin are done, but we also have these really beautiful other kind, sorry, I don't know my cherry blossom varieties, but they have these big, beautiful pink double blooms and they're in season right now and they're just gorgeous. So, I've been enjoying going and seeing them. I was lucky enough to be able to enjoy part of the, like, gorgeous day last Monday to go and see the eclipse for a little bit. But what I really enjoyed was when I got back to my place, I mean, I just went outside my place. I didn't go somewhere fancy. And I, last year, bought this fun disco ball planter, and where it sits, it picks up the afternoon sunlight at certain times of the year. It's not all the time. And it was able to, so it usually, you know, throws reflections from that. But during the eclipse, it threw, like, the eclipse, and it was so cool to see the crescent of the sun and could watch the stages of the eclipse through the reflections. It threw on my walls. It was pretty, it was pretty neat and very unexpected. I don't know why I didn't think about that in advance. So, when I looked up at one point and saw, like, crescent moons all over my walls, it was pretty neat. Well, I guess crescent sun's reflections, so it was really neat. I enjoyed that. So that was a lot of fun. Let's see here. Also, I just feel like there's been a lot going on in the abortion arena. You know, we had the SCOTUS case earlier this year around mifepristone. There was the Florida Supreme Court case that we're gonna talk about today. Then there was the Arizona case, like it's just, feels like it's been nonstop. And next week there's the EMTALA case in front of the Supreme Court. Don't worry, next week we'll have an episode talking about that. There's just, it just feels like there's so much, and it's a lot. So, you know, remembering to take time to, like, step away and breathe and relax and not focus on all the things has been important. And also, important to, like, take the time and do some rage donating. I made sure to give to some various abortion funds, Texas and Florida. I mean Arizona and Florida because they need them right now. Yeah, so just like taking a step back. And I've also been trying to be better. I've really been not in the mood to do big, complicated baking for a while. So, I've been doing really quick bakes. And this last weekend I finally got in the mood to do something a little more complicated again and made bagels. So, I had those for breakfast all week. I made Cinnamon Raisin bagels. They were delightful. Yeah, so very nice. You know, I feel like it's been a while since we've done some housekeeping, so I thought maybe we would do a little bit of that today. So, first, make sure you are subscribed to us on your various podcast platforms. Whatever you're listening to, wherever you listen to us at, you make sure you don't miss episodes. You can also sign up for our newsletter on our website to make sure that you get an email when a new episode comes out. If you like the podcast, make sure to rate and review us. It helps other people find the podcast, so that would also be amazing. And follow us on social, we're at @rePROsFightBack on Facebook and Twitter and @reprosfb on Instagram and Threads. And oh yeah, we're starting to get our back catalog and all the new episodes on YouTube. There's not video, there's just like an audiogram type thing, but we are on YouTube if that is your preferred platform. So, you can also check us out there. I think those are all the, like, big housekeeping things I have right now. Oh, and like the evergreen, like if you wanna support us, please feel free to donate to us on our website at reprosfightback.com. Okay. With that, let's turn to this week's episode. I'm really excited we talk about ever that came down in the Florida Supreme Court cases--I guess now when you hear this would've been two weeks ago--we have Lauren Brenzel with Floridians Protecting Freedom. We had a really great conversation. They talk about the six-week abortion ban that's gonna be going to effect on May 1st. And they talk about the ballot initiative. So, a little bleak, a little hopeful, a lot to talk about. So, let's turn to our conversation with Lauren. Hi Lauren! Thank you so much for being here.

Lauren: Thank you so much for having me.

Jennie: Before we dig in and talk to all the things that are happening in Florida, do you wanna take a quick second and introduce yourself and include your pronouns?

Lauren: Yeah, my name is Lauren Brenzel. I'm the Campaign Director for Floridians Protecting Freedom. I use they/them pronouns. And I got started in repro health work about 10 years ago, a little bit over 10 years ago now. I worked in a Planned Parenthood call center and then Planned Parenthood front desk and then have made my way into organizing over the last decade and now we're here in the fight of the moment to try to get access to abortion back in Florida.

Jennie: Wow, that's quite a path to travel and, like, getting to talk to so many people trying to access care. That's gotta be great for informing your work now.

Lauren: Right now, what I keep reflecting on is I'm imagining myself sitting in the call center looking at patient visits and scheduling patients. And I'm thinking about those appointments just disappearing on May 1st. And I'm thinking about people I really care about who still work in health centers and all the work that they're trying to do right now, creating support for their patients, knowing that we have the third largest population in the United States and we're the second largest abortion provider and we're about to lose access to most care here. And the logistics of that are insurmountable in some ways. Like, abortion funds are gonna do everything that they can possibly do because they care deeply about patients and they wanna protect them. And providers are gonna do everything that they can possibly do to make patients get care, whether it's here or elsewhere in the country. But people are gonna fall through the cracks because we're too large of a state and the law is so draconian.

Jennie: I feel like that gives us a really great place to start. And I was gonna ask it a little later, but I think this is like the perfect place for it is like: why is this Florida decision, before we talk about the decision itself but like why is it so important, not just for Florida?

Lauren: The fabric of abortion access in our nation is falling apart. I think about Florida, and I also think about the decision out of Arizona to enact an 1864 ban on abortion. None of these policies are popular. What we're seeing right now is the result of extremists in positions of power who are moving policy that's out-of-step with what normal people wanna see and out of step with what is actually entailed in pregnancy. We are in danger. You can't jam 84,000 patients into other states. You can't expect that people won't need life-saving care and be denied that access when providers are afraid of going to prison. And I don't think that we as a country are totally ready to deal with what's about to come with regards to abortion access, given the decisions out of Arizona and out of Florida.

Jennie: Yeah, and like we've been talking for a long time about, like, the lack of abortion access in the South, but that meant a lot of people were traveling to Florida to get the care. And if Florida goes, that means people are gonna have to travel that much further to get access to basic healthcare.

Lauren: It's even more complicated than that because we actually do not see a ton of out of state patients. About 10% of our patient base is out of state because the states around us are not comparatively as large as us. Like, we just are a behemoth of a state. Texas has a variety of options, not good enough because they're an incredibly large state. They used to be the second provider of care in the nation. They're the second largest state in the nation. They lost 15,000 patient visits a year. So, that's been distributed already to other states and is patient impact that's had to be taken up by state infrastructure. And so, the real story of Florida is just that the math is no longer gonna work for absorbing patients into other states. And then you consider our state's unique geography and how it makes patient access for our folks even worse because they don't have the option to just drive out of state easily. You think if somebody from Miami-Dade County, they're entirely surrounded by water, there isn't a jump in your car and go. The jump in your car and go is drive nine hours to the border and then pass South Carolina and then see if you can even get a visit in North Carolina. But North Carolina and Virginia combined see less than 50,000 patients a year. So, the reality is people from Florida are gonna have to travel to states like Illinois and New York to be able to access care. And again, funds are gonna do everything. Patient navigation programs are gonna do everything to get people the resources they need to do that kind of travel. But those resources are not gonna be found by everyone. We're gonna lose people in the crack of this. People are going to be forced to give birth. And again, people who are in incredibly dangerous medical situations will not be able to easily travel out of state to get care. And it'll be up to providers to make determinations not about what's the best care for their patient, but if they're willing to risk incarceration to give their patient the best care.

Jennie: Okay. So, we kind of, like, put the cart before the horse and that was like totally on me, but let's turn it back a little bit and go, so, there was this ruling out of the Florida Supreme Court. What happened and what's, like, next?

Lauren: It was a really wild day on April 1st. Yeah. So, the Supreme Court of Florida had a deadline where they had to hear whether or not initiatives would go on the ballot for 2024. So, there was a personal usage of adult cannabis and then there was the amendment to limit government interference with abortion. And they were using their absolute constitutionally available time. The April 1st deadline at 4:00 PM is when we heard about our initiative. What we weren't anticipating at the same time was a ruling for the 15-week abortion ban. There was nothing that said that the courts had to rule on the ban on April 1st. That was totally up to their discretion to do that. And there were a few avenues that they could have taken with that case. They could have ruled the ban unconstitutional, which what previous courts would've done. We had a privacy clause that had been ruled previously to extend to abortion and medical privacy. They could have thrown the 15-week case out on a different cause. And instead, what they did was overturn medical privacy, the implicit right to medical privacy in our state constitution. And that meant an enactment of our six-week abortion ban is gonna happen. That means that in action of our state's 15 or in an action- the court ruling that they gave that overturned our implicit right to medical privacy means that the six-week abortion ban will go into effect here in Florida on May 1st.

Jennie: So yeah, what a chaotic day.

Lauren: It was an incredibly chaotic day, and I was not anticipating that moment where we would find out both that we had qualified and that access to care for 84,000 patients was about to be denied. So, it just, it filled all of us with a renewed sense of rage and a renewed mandate for why we need to get this done. It's no longer hypothetical. We have a responsibility to restore access for these patients.

Jennie: Yeah, it was one of those that was hard to message, right? Because it was, you needed people to know about the ballot initiative. You needed people to know about the ruling, but also for people to know that they still had a month where they could access abortion and you saw messages that were kind of all over the place. And so, parts of it were getting lost in the conversation.

Lauren: Parts were getting lost in the conversation, too. And just that I think that by and large, these aren't political decisions. So, when we have politicians of any ilk talking about healthcare, it gets really complicated because oftentimes they're not leading with a patient-centered message around that. So, I think that it's really important that folks are looking to organizations like the Florida Access Network, like the Tampa Bay Abortion Fund, like Planned Parenthoods in the state to get messaging about how to continue to access care and what options are available for care after May 1st.

Jennie: Yeah, I know that's always been one of the big, complicated things around when there were court decisions where people would immediately think that care wasn't available as soon as they would see these headlines and not see that it wasn't gonna take effect until May one. So, there was like a whole month where they could still access care.

Lauren: It's almost like these laws are written to be incredibly confusing and that they're not based on medical practice.

Jennie: What? No. [Laughs]

Lauren: No, it is so complicated. Floridians have been in a holding pattern. This law was passed in 2023, the six-week abortion ban, and the 15-week ban was passed in 2022. So, litigation has been happening around the 15 weeks since 2022. And then the fact that legislators insidiously tied in the 6-week bill to the 15-week case, it creates a state of chaos and misinformation and disinformation that's really hard for normal people to act to wade their way through. And the more uncomfortable reality than that is that many people still don't know about these laws. Like, not everybody is a policy nerd or a repro nerd. And so, there are still gonna be patients who are gonna try to access an abortion, not knowing at all about the six-week ban. And the way they'll find out about the six-week ban is when they try to schedule an appointment for care.

Jennie: Or the reverse, right? They heard that Roe v Wade was struck down and so they assume they haven't been able to access care.

Lauren: Yeah. Again, it's just when we allow politicians to intervene with medical care that they don't value and don't respect, and at a base level seem to not understand pregnancy or menstruation or birth control-

Jennie: Seriously.

Lauren: -we end up with these policies that are absolutely arbitrary and absolutely just meant to shame and harm people. I think a lot in Florida about if you truly cared about families and children, we are at the same time as we're having a six-week abortion passed, we had bills to dismantle our public education system and to really prioritize the privatization of education and vouchers for charter schools. We had a bill to ban sex education. So, we know that when you have available sex education and access to contraception, you're less likely to have an unplanned pregnancy. Instead, we're prioritizing banning abortion and banning sex ed at the same time. And then we still haven't expanded Medicaid in the state. So, we don't have healthcare options for the vast majority of folks who qualify in other states. We have over a million people who could qualify for Medicaid in the state of Florida, and $6 billion in federal funding was rejected in order to enact that. So, we claim to have a culture that supports families and wants to see children born in the great state of Florida. And then, we ask babies to pull themselves up by the bootstraps immediately. And that shows that this isn't about compassionate care, this is about controlling people's bodies, controlling their futures.

Jennie: Yeah.

Lauren: And it's a nihilistic and disturbing sentiment.

Jennie: It also really makes me nervous that they overturned this privacy for reproductive health. Like, and my mind that most times is like thinking about how the groups that are attacking trans rights and the groups that are attacking reproductive rights and abortion are like, they're the same people, right? It's the same group. So, like, I can just see the next stage of that ruling attacking trans access to healthcare as well.

Lauren: There's always a next stage in attacking access. I think, too, about the Alabama decision. There was so much attention placed on IVF and the banning of IVF, which is absolutely unconscionable that you would attempt to ban that. But it speaks to also...it tends to be that IVF is not covered under insurance. So there tends to be a certain level of advocacy that wealthier individuals have that I think is related to why that got such coverage. At the same time, they banned birth control. Anything that is considered, quote-unquote an "abortifacient," which is a lie and a misnomer that's created simply with the cause of banning abortion, excuse me, banning abortion, banning birth control, banning contraception. So, we're already seeing those ripple effects. I think, too, about what we'll continue to see out of the Supreme Court with the proliferation of the states' rights context. I'm queer and I'm planning with my fiancée right now and I don't feel comfortable getting married in my state because I don’t know what’s gonna happen to my marriage license a few years from now. It's all related and it's all deeply interconnected. And the south is a canary in a coal mine for what is coming for the rest of the US always in US history and abortion right now as a salient issue is a canary in the coal mine for what's coming for everything else.

Jennie: Okay. That all feels really bleak other than congratulations on being engaged. That's exciting. But the rest of that was pretty bleak. Let's, like, turn to like maybe like the little more hopeful side and that's the part-

Lauren: Mm-hmm.

Jennie: -where there's this ballot initiative. Tell us about the ballot initiative.

Lauren: Yeah, the ballot initiative is the thing that gives me hope because there is something so beautiful about direct democracy when it's outside of the hands of political representation and all of the complications that come with that and in the hands of constituents directly. I think that that is beautiful, and I think that that creates a realm of power that is so unique. It's often also so...and often in the state of Florida that we have a problem created for us by our government and that we're able to deliver a solution. And so, the fact that the six-week ban came down and we also know that we have the opportunity to vote to remove it in November. I have deep rage, but I'm more motivated to act than I ever have been before. And I know so many of us in the state are feeling like that. It is hopeful to be able to harness citizens' collective power and the actual people of Florida instead of relying on legislators who do not represent our values.

Jennie: And, you know, it's so great. Like, we have seen good things when abortion has been on the ballot, right? Like, we know that people support abortion rights and it's always just, I find it hopeful in a time when everything does feel a little bleak to think about people voting to get our basic human rights back.

Lauren: It is an incredibly important and powerful thing. And what we're seeing is also an attack on these initiatives in states that are putting abortion directly on the ballot. The issue of democracy and abortion has become inherently linked as folks realize that they're out of step with what their constituents think on this issue. We're also seeing attempts, like we saw in Ohio, to put forward a 60% threshold special election ballot initiative right before Ohio's election on abortion. So, we're seeing attacks on direct democracy. We saw in Ohio an initiative that was referred by the legislature to try to enact a 60% threshold on citizens' initiatives in August before their November election to protect abortion access. In Florida, we already have a 60% threshold that was enacted to make it harder to pass citizens' initiatives. We're seeing a lot of weaponization of bureaucracy. And then after these initiatives are passed in many places with double margins, double margin victories, attempts by the legislature to not enact what their constituents have voted for and pass well beyond 50% in those states. So again, we're seeing how abortion is deeply tied to issues of voter suppression and other issues that are emblematic of the problems we're facing nationally with the overreach of politicians in our country.

Jennie: Two really important things that need to be happening right now, and that's making sure that people are able to access abortion care now and making sure that people vote for this ballot initiative. So, we always like to, you know, wrap up the podcast by looking at: what can our audience do? How can our audience support these things right now? What actions can they take?

Lauren: Number one, if you're interested in making sure that people have direct access to care in the state of Florida, you should donate to an abortion fund. Florida Access Network and Tampa Bay Abortion Fund are some great funds. There are funds all across the state. You could also consider donating to your local Planned Parenthood affiliate or your Planned Parenthood affiliate in Florida. Florida's Planned Parenthood run a patient navigation program that helps connect patients in our state with Planned Parenthood and other states to make sure that they have access to care. We also wanna get the word out about this initiative. Our website is yes4fl.com. That's yes the number four fl.com. We will be listing in the upcoming months volunteer opportunities. You can make a donation to our campaign. We have donors as small as a dollar up to a million dollars. So far, we've been incredibly lucky. We've been able to raise about a million in grassroots support and we need that because the fight ahead of us we're the state with the highest threshold and the highest patient impact that has run a ballot initiative before. So, the pressure is immense. And then, letting people know about Florida's near-total abortion ban is also huge. People cannot forget what the stakes are talking about Arizona and Florida now, and their initiatives are absolutely critical.

Jennie: Well, Lauren, thank you so much for being here. I had so much fun talking to you about terrible things, but also really hopeful things with the ballot initiative.

Lauren: Thank you. Thank you for having me. Have a wonderful day.

Jennie: Okay, y'all, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Lauren. I had a great time talking to them. It was wonderful to learn about what was happening in Florida and why this Florida Supreme Court's decision and enacting the six-week abortion ban is so important. And to then get hopeful and see the ballot initiative in a way that Floridians can make their voices heard and make sure that people can access abortion care. But there are a lot of people that are gonna be caught in that gap if, you know, the ballot initiative passes, but between May 1st and then for people who aren't gonna be able to access care. So, please, please, if you are able to donate to your Florida abortion fund, make sure that you- if you can't, maybe through a fundraiser, tell other people about it so people are able to access the care they need. And with that, I will see you all back next week for our episode and EMTALA at the Supreme Court. [music outro] If you have any questions, comments, or topics you would like us to cover, always feel free to shoot me an email. You can reach me at jennie@reprosfightback.com or you can find us on social media. We're at @RePROsFightBack on Facebook and Twitter or @reprosfb on Instagram. If you love our podcast and wanna make sure more people find it, take the time to rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. Or if you wanna make sure to support the podcast, you can also donate on our website at reprofightback.com. Thanks all!