New report shows how maternal care in Florida has worsened
Abortion bans has had chilling effects on needed and desired healthcare, according to 25 doctors interviewed.
A new report portrays a grim reality maternal care specialists face in Florida, where a six-week abortion ban rules the land.
Physicians for Human Rights, a group dedicated to advancing reproductive freedom, issued the study–chock full of medical perspectives on how the abortion ban has affected women in the state who need abortions for a multitude of reasons.
After the six-week ban went into effect, the researchers behind this study undertook fact-finding interviews from July to August 2024 with 25 clinicians and clinicians in training to document whether and, if so, how Florida’s abortion ban is impacting patients, healthcare workers, and access to health care. We interviewed clinicians in obstetrics and gynecology, maternal-fetal medicine, family medicine, reproductive endocrinology, certified nurse midwifery, medical students, and genetic counselors across the state, with representation in varied practice types that include public and private hospitals, academic medical centers, private practices, and free-standing abortion-providing facilities.
In these interviews, clinicians described the serious and manifold harms the ban is causing pregnant people in the state who seek reproductive health care. The six-week ban is unclear in its guidelines and introduces barriers to care, delays in emergency reproductive services, and deviations from standard medical care.
Moreover, the steep penalties, particularly when combined with other laws, create intensified fear and confusion among healthcare providers who do not know in what cases they legally can or cannot provide abortion care, creating strain in the patient-clinician relationship and inducing providers and trainees to leave the state. Clinicians report receiving warnings from hospital administrators, legislators, and others that they may be targeted for providing necessary abortions and that these laws are being strictly enforced. That has had a chilling effect, according to the report.
The physicians shared stories about how delayed care had imperiled people’s lives and how an inability to pay for increasing costs had left many in precarious situations where they couldn’t get the care they needed or wanted.
The report indicated that the day after the six-week ban went into effect, the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) released emergency rules - stating that certain pregnancy terminations, including for premature preterm rupture of membranes (PPROM), ectopic pregnancy, and trophoblastic tumors, should not be considered abortion for reporting purposes. These guidelines lack medical clarity, further confusing clinicians.
That’s compounded by the Targeted Regulations of Abortion Providers, known as TRAP laws, that force clinics to comply with costly mandates and 24-hour waiting periods with two required in-person appointments. Though TRAP laws seem to be from a different era of antiabortionism, they remain on the books as even more restrictive attempts have been undertaken by the opposition.
On a tangential note, simply because the abortion rights movement has lost ground—so much ground–that doesn’t mean that leaders and activists should accept TRAP laws as a compromise. Parental consent is as problematic now as it was in Becky Bell’s time. Spousal consent is still troubling. Twenty-four-hour waiting periods are not common ground between abortion access and an outright ban. I guarantee some politicians will attempt to appear reasonable in the coming years by supporting what used to be considered the antiabortion approach. It’ll seem moderate now because of how things have developed in the reproductive landscape.