Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has signed a bill into law that will ban almost all abortions after six weeks – making the state one of the most restrictive in America to obtain abortion care.
Mr DeSantis – who is expected to soon announce a 2024 presidential bid – quietly signed the measure just hours after the state legislature passed the bill on Thursday afternoon.
The governor then waited until almost midnight before announcing it.
“We are proud to support life and family in the state of Florida,” he said in a statement.
“I applaud the Legislature for passing the Heartbeat Protection Act that expands pro-life protections and provides additional resources for young mothers and families.”
The new law now bans abortions after six weeks in the state – a time when many women do not even know they are pregnant.
There are exemptions for rape or incest or to protect the life of the mother up to 15 weeks of pregnancy.
The new law will go into effect after Florida’s Supreme Court overturns its previous precedent on abortion.
Florida had been one of the last states in the southeast in which people could receive abortion care more than six weeks into their pregnancies. The state already had a 15-week abortion ban on the books, which the six-week ban favoured by Mr DeSantis will now replace.
Now Mr DeSantis has signed the bill, people in the region will have to travel even greater distances to get care with South Carolina remaining the only state in the Deep South in which abortion remains legal — and that is only because the state Supreme Court blocked a six-week ban as unconstitutional earlier this year. The Republican-controlled state legislature is considering a new ban.
Meanwhile, abortion is fully banned in Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Arkansas, and banned at six weeks, before many people know they’re pregnant, in Georgia.
In North Carolina, where abortion remains legal up to 20 weeks, the defection of a Democratic legislator has handed the Republicans a statehouse supermajority that they can use to pass further restrictions over the veto of Gov Roy Cooper.
With the status of abortion in the Carolinas in limbo, Virginia and Illinois may become the closest states for many Southerners without abortion restrictions.
Bans on abortion remain politically unpopular, with a sizable majority of Americans disagreeing with the decision to overturn Roe v Wade and favouring the ongoing availability of medication abortion, but the legislation in Florida comes in a very particular context: Mr DeSantis weighing a bid for president.
Thursday’s vote on the bill mainly fell along party lines, though several Republicans broke with their party to vote against the measure and nine legislators refrained from voting.
The fact the ban passed at all is remarkable considering that, until several years ago, Florida was one of the country’s most closely-contested swing states, split roughly evenly between Democrats and Republicans.
Just a year ago, abortion was legal up to 24 weeks of pregnancy. State legislators then passed a 15-week ban before passing the six-week ban on Thursday.
In addition to the abortion ban, the legislature in the last two years has passed bills targeting the state’s transgender community, immigrants, free speech in schools, and academic freedom in the university system.
The six-week abortion ban gives Mr DeSantis something to run on in a Republican primary, though it is not likely to be a popular achievement should he advance to a general election.
