A Florida trial court allowed a pro-life law to go into effect Friday mandating that abortion clinics and doctors require mothers to wait 24 hours before they abort their unborn baby.
Gainesville Woman Care had attempted to temporarily block the law to keep what proponents call mandatory “reflection periods” from going into effect.
“If you are going to describe abortion as medicine, then you have to have informed consent,” Carolyn McDonnell, staff counsel at Americans United For Life, told The Daily Wire in an interview. “Any medical procedure requires informed consent and reflection periods are a part of that.”
“For example, it takes 24 hours to terminate parental rights, three days to get a marriage license, and 20 days to get a divorce,” she said.
The court had indicated on March 23 that it would grant the motion to begin enforcing the 24-hour waiting period. Gainesville Woman Care, the abortion provider challenging the law, had filed a motion to stay. The court denied it.
The 24-hour waiting period law was enacted in 2015. It strengthened preexisting informed consent provisions in the Women’s Right to Know Act by requiring that the abortionist or the referring physician make “informed consent disclosures” to the mother “at least 24 hours before the procedure” except in life-threatening emergencies, the court order says.
“As the United States Supreme Court has acknowledged,” the order says “whether to have an abortion poses ‘a difficult and painful moral decision,’ and women who regret that decision may experience ‘regret,’ ‘severe depression,’ ‘loss of esteem,’ ‘grief,’ and ‘sorrow.'”
Abortion supporters, the order says, had argued that the 24-hour waiting period “impinges on the women’s right of privacy.”
But Florida argued that the law was to protect women from pressure by abortion doctors and failures by the abortion industry to “give women the necessary time to consider the important informed consent disclosures.”
The state also argued that abortion providers, the plaintiffs, “generate income from providing abortions and generate more profits if they can do those abortions without a 24-hour waiting period.”
FL is now a 24 hour mandatory delay state meaning that in order to access an abortion you have to make at least 2 trips to a health center 24 hours apart. Walk past protesters 2 times, find transportation support, time off work, childcare etc. & soon we’ll have a 15 week ban too. pic.twitter.com/FaHGnG9GL8
— Rep. Anna V. Eskamani 🔨 (@AnnaForFlorida) April 11, 2022
“This mandatory delay and additional trip requirement is an insult to all Floridians, but it will have particularly harsh consequences for patients with low incomes, because of the significant financial costs that HB633’s extra-trip requirement imposes—including missed work, lost wages, and significantly increased transportation and child care costs,” the ACLU of Florida said in a March press release after the court indicated it would rule for the State.
“The law also jeopardizes patients’ health and undermines the privacy of Floridians’ abortion decisions,” the progressive organization added.
The pro-life win comes as Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis preps to sign a bill that bans abortions after 15 weeks in the state of Florida. The state currently allows abortion up until 24 weeks.