DeSantis signed a near-total abortion ban. Here’s what those directly affected think of it
Owner Leda Lanza poked her head out of her office at the East Cypress Women’s Center, an abortion clinic in a Fort Lauderdale strip mall. All of the chairs in the carpeted waiting room were filled.
“Gentlemen, I am going to have to ask you to leave to make space for the ladies,” Lanza said.
The men — boyfriends, husbands, fathers — dutifully stood up and filed out of the small, gray room, decorated with thank-you notes, pro-abortion-rights newspaper op-eds and a postcard featuring a photo of Barack and Michelle Obama. The women remained.
As Florida lawmakers have ratcheted ever tighter the restrictions on abortion, including a just-passed six-week abortion ban aimed at emptying clinics like this one, a Miami Herald investigation found clinic waiting rooms as crowded as ever and maybe more so. That may have something to do with the overall number of clinics being reduced, but it is also likely a result of expatriates coming to Florida from other states that have restricted abortion access even more.
Now, with the state’s newly adopted six-week abortion limit — before many women even know they are pregnant — operators like Lanza wonder what’s next.
Much has been written about the abortion-related wrangling in Tallahassee, including the law’s impact on the political ambitions of Gov. Ron DeSantis, who signed it surrounded by supporters at a ceremony in the middle of the night. Less publicized are the thoughts and fears of the people whose lives, livelihoods and futures will be directly affected.
The six-week ban is not currently being implemented because a previously adopted 15-week ban is awaiting a ruling by the Florida Supreme Court, dominated by DeSantis appointees. The state was allowed to enforce that restriction while legal challenges worked their way through the court system. If upheld, that 15-week cutoff would be replaced by the six-week threshold.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF CHOICE
Four miles and a world away from East Cypress, Respect Life Ministry’s Pregnancy Help Center also has gray walls and the feel of a medical office, which it is not. Its mission is to convince pregnant women to carry their pregnancy to term.
While the abortion clinic’s decor emphasizes body autonomy and celebrates politicians who want abortion to remain legal, the iconography at Respect Life is vastly different. Respect Life is adorned with models of fetal development — posters with images of fetuses, fetal models in cardboard boxes and models that show a fetus inside a cervix.
Angela Curatalo runs three pregnancy centers that amount to anti-abortion centers, assisting women who want to go through with their pregnancies, beckoning those on the fence.
If abortion clinics are angry over the Legislature’s action, Curatalo is overjoyed. The three Respect Life locations are known as crisis pregnancy centers. Florida has nearly 160 such centers, many affiliated with the Catholic Church. Yet the six-week ban isn’t all they are celebrating. The crisis centers are enjoying a fresh infusion of taxpayer dollars — as much as $25 million per year among them — courtesy of staunchly anti-abortion lawmakers, who are firmly in control of the Legislature.
“There are so many babies that are going to come into our world, and do wonderful things. Who are we to say that one life is more valuable than another?” said Curatalo. As she spoke, she held a small black velvet box. Inside, plastic models of fetuses at seven, eight, nine and 10 weeks gestation were nestled in black foam.
While abortion clinics like East Cypress say women deserve a choice, Curatalo and her allies say women do have a choice: between raising their child or giving him or her up for adoption.
Curatalo’s definition of “choice” is in vogue politically in Florida, at least for now. The number of abortion clinics is shrinking. As of May 2023, there are 51 licensed abortion facilities in Florida, according to the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration. In 2014, there were 71. Since 2010, according to the same data, 31 abortion clinics have either closed or had their licenses revoked.
The number of crisis pregnancy centers is growing. Remaining abortion clinics, meanwhile, have struggled to cope with what they say are increasingly aggressive laws and sidewalk protesters seeking to dissuade women from entering the clinics, including a group called Sidewalk Advocates for Life, whose self-proclaimed objective is to “transform the sidewalk in front of every abortion and abortion-referral facility in America.”
Linda Freire is a programs manager for Sidewalk Advocates For Life and lives in Miami. When she was in college, she had an abortion that ended with her sitting in her car in pain as she bled. She said the experience was traumatizing — and led her to dedicate her life to helping women choose other pathways besides abortion. She says the new six-week ban is necessary and helps women understand the consequences of sex, and to know their dignity as women.
“Chemical abortion [pills] are given out like candy, yet It’s nothing to mess around with,” she said. “It not only harms you physically, but it harms you mentally, emotionally and psychologically.”
Conversely, a decade-long study of 1,000 women by a University of California San Francisco-based group found that, in general, carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term harms women physically and psychologically more than having an abortion.
Curatalo, seizing the moment, hopes to deploy mobile pregnancy help centers, which will allow the organization to meet women where they are.
In other parts of Florida, including Palm Beach County, Catholic Charities already has two such units. They offer pregnancy tests, sonograms and counseling in places like church parking lots.
