The fallout of Florida’s abortion ban has been "chaos," experts say

Two months ago, the state of Florida enacted its strict six-week abortion law. At the time, many people worried about how this would affect access to abortion care in the South. As the Society of Family Planning's #WeCount report found, post-Dobbs Florida became one of the top three states to see a rise in out-of-state abortions. In other words, it became an unlikely surge state as the vast majority of its neighboring states had more severe restrictions.

Now, new data from the National Abortion Federation (NAF) found that in the two months after going into effect, there has been a 575% increase in people who the hotline has supported to travel out of the state for care, compared to the same time in 2023.

“What we've seen in the aftermath of this ban is just devastation and chaos, and it has really impacted the lives of Floridians but also has expanded its impact throughout the southeast,” Brittany Fonteno, president and CEO of the National Abortion Federation, told Salon in a phone interview. “We have seen a dramatic increase in people being forced to travel outside of Florida, outside of the Southeast, and having to travel further distances to access the essential health care that they need.”

NAF runs the National Abortion Hotline, which is the largest patient assistance fund in the country. They help people both pay for their abortion care and with associated travel costs, whether that’s a plane ticket, rideshare voucher, or anything to help them access abortion care. Notably, NAF has observed an increase in funding needed to be allocated to each patient since people are being forced to travel longer distances.

“This point last year, the average cost of travel assistance for a patient was about $1,000,” Fonteno said. “That has already gone up, and that is before we even take into account what it costs to pay for an abortion procedure or medication abortion — this is really making abortion less accessible to people.”

According to Florida’s law, it is a felony to perform or actively participate in an abortion six weeks after gestation. The ban has exceptions for rape, incest and human trafficking up to 15 weeks, and to save a woman’s life or prevent “substantial and irreversible” impairment. However, as experts point out, these exceptions are designed to be difficult to use and frequently act as another burden for patients to overcome.

For example, according to the law, to leverage one of the exceptions for rape, incest or human trafficking, a woman “must provide a copy of a restraining order, police report, medical record or other court order or documentation providing evidence that she is obtaining the termination of pregnancy because she is a victim of rape, incest or human trafficking.”

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“A lot of times these exceptions are put into abortion bans to try to make them seem more reasonable, and they are not,” Fonteno said. “And one of the big reasons is that these exceptions are putting a burden back onto the patient, and they're designed to serve as another barrier to care.”

Fonteno said the hotline has seen “that many people are not being able to get through based on these very narrow exceptions” and many people even in these circumstances have to travel out of state to access care.

“They’re having to fly or travel to D.C., to New York City, places where the cost is higher to get the care that they need, and so this is really having an interesting impact on the entire field,” she said. “Because it's also impacting the amount of funding that people have available to them, because as more people travel, and as the cost of care is increasing, that means the funds that are available to support people are depleting even faster.”

Alisha Dingus, the development director at the D.C. Abortion Fund, told Salon in July that they were seeing an influx in people from other states outside the area — specifically, from North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Pennsylvania and South Carolina.

“After the Florida ban went into effect, we saw our call rate from Floridians go up by 200 percent just in one month,” Dingus said. “The month before the ban, we supported nine Floridians, and then the next month, we supported 36 and so that number just dramatically increased the moment the ban hit.”

At the time, Dingus said she was expecting that number to keep going up.

Fortunately, Fonteno said they haven’t had to turn away any callers and leave people forced to carry their pregnancies to term.

“However, I don't think that just because I'm not aware of it, that it's not happening,” Fonteno said. “And so I would say that it is a very real possibility that people are being forced to carry pregnancies to term that are either not viable or that were unwanted.”

Fonteno added that clinics in Florida are doing their best to work with people and get them in as early as possible in pregnancy to get them the care they need.

“They’re getting into the clinics as soon as possible, and when they're not able to get in before that six-week cut-off, the hotline is there to help them,” Fonteno said. “But our NAF member clinics have also said that there will be people who aren't able to access the care that they need because they cannot afford to fill in the gap and travel outside of the state for care.”