With less than a week until Florida’s 15-week abortion cutoff is set to take effect, Planned Parenthood clinics are scrambling to provide abortions to desperate women at or past 15 weeks of pregnancy while also fielding calls from patients who are concerned about what the fall of Roe v. Wade means for their future.
“The sound of panic in a patient’s voice on the phone right now, it’s just, it’s heartbreaking. And then they ask us why, and I’m like, ‘I don’t know why they’re doing this,'” said Stephanie Fraim, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida.
So far, Fraim believes Planned Parenthood will accommodate everyone who needs an abortion before Friday, when Florida’s 15-week ban is set to take effect.
“We’ve done all kinds of expanding of schedules, working extra hours,” Fraim said on Tuesday. “But it’s a hard stop on Friday, right? So, we only have three more days.”
A judge will decide Thursday whether to delay its start date amid an ongoing lawsuit filed by the ACLU and Planned Parenthood. The suit argues a law passed by the Florida Legislature this spring, HB 5, violates a right to privacy, which is protected in the state’s constitution.
The law offers few exceptions, allowing abortions after 15 weeks only if two doctors attest the termination of a pregnancy is necessary to save the mother from death or serious injury, or if the fetus has a “fatal fetal abnormality,” defined as a condition that will result in death at birth or immediately after regardless of attempts to save the newborn’s life.
About 96-98% of abortions in Florida happen before the 15-week cutoff, according to 2019 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Data from Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration suggests the thousands of women getting abortions in their second trimester are more likely to do so because they discovered a serious genetic anomaly in their fetuses.
A 2017 analysis of national data by the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research and policy organization, suggests Black women and lower-income women are more likely not to obtain an abortion until the second trimester as well.
Fraim said if and when the law takes effect, Planned Parenthood will pause requests for abortions that are past 15 weeks in Florida until the state defines what specific conditions constitute a “fatal fetal abnormality.”
From 2020 to 2021 — the latest data available — Planned Parenthood provided 5,893 abortions across the entire Southeast, according to its annual report. In Florida alone, there were 79,817 abortions in 2021, the AHCA notes.
This law is just one of many recent attempts to make abortions harder to obtain in the Sunshine State, which has long been a safe haven for people from nearby southern states with stricter anti-abortion laws, Fraim said.
In April, Florida began requiring a 24-hour waiting period between a consultation for an abortion and the procedure. Fraim said she has seen this impact on “countless” women, but one story stands out to her.
It was the day the law went into effect. A woman had flown to the state from Texas, and between the time she stepped off her plane to the time she arrived at Planned Parenthood, the waiting-period law came down.
Fraim told her they couldn’t do her procedure that day as planned — she’d have to return the next day.
“She said to me, nobody knows I’m here. She said I can’t, I can’t stay overnight, I can’t,” Fraim said. “We had to send her home to Texas. I still hold her in my heart. We have some really hard stories that we don’t know the ending to right now.”
Planned Parenthood is not only raising funds to help women in Florida go out of state for abortions if needed, but also preparing for women from other states with stricter anti-abortion laws or all-out bans to travel here for abortions. Since Roe v. Wade fell, trigger bans have gone into effect in several states, though many of the bans are already facing legal challenges.
Fraim is counting on other organizations such as the Florida Access Network, a nonprofit abortion fund that provides financial assistance to women struggling to afford the cost of an abortion or the cost of travel to get one.
“We’re trying to hire as fast as we can, expand hours as fast as we can,” Fraim said. “We’re raising funds to do all of that right now.”
ccatherman@orlandosentinel.com
