The Governor of Florida Ron DeSantis who is a prominent figure in the Republican Party and is currently being tipped to run for president in 2024, has signed into law a six-week abortion ban, making the southern state the latest to enact severe restrictions on the procedure in the US.
The state’s Republican-led House of Representatives okayed the ban by a vote of 70 to 40 yesterday, which will now allow the bill to proceed to the governor’s desk.
The vote has now placed Florida among an estimated 13 other states that have enacted similar bans on abortion at six weeks of pregnancy or earlier.
Florida had previously banned abortion past 15 weeks. Critics argue that most patients do not realise they are pregnant so soon after conception, rendering the latest bill a near-total ban.
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In the wake of its passage, the administration of Democratic President Joe Biden issued a statement opposing what it called an “extreme and dangerous new abortion ban”.
‘The ban flies in the face of fundamental freedoms and is out of step with the views of the vast majority of the people of Florida and of all the United States,’ White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre wrote in a statement.
She added that Thursday’s ban would not only affect the 4 million women of reproductive age in Florida but also patients in surrounding states, where similar bans are in effect.
Many of them, Jean-Pierre argued, ‘have previously relied on travel to Florida as an option to access care’.
Florida has some of the highest rates of abortions in the US. The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) Health Policy Research nonprofit found that, in 2020, an estimated 74,868 legal abortions were performed in Florida, the most of any state.
The next highest totals were in New York and Texas. Florida has the third-highest state population in the US, recently surpassing New York.