In recent years, the battle over reproductive rights has intensified, with lawmakers across the United States introducing restrictive legislation limiting access to abortion for many people. One of the recent bans is the six-week abortion ban which aims to ban abortion by the time they can detect a heartbeat from the fetus. The ban has faced a lot of backlash, and people in Florida argue that they have nowhere else to go to gain access to safe abortion. This ban has forced people to give up their bodily autonomy and has basically blocked all access to safe and legal abortion in the south east.
The six-week abortion ban is a more extreme version of the fifteen-week abortion ban Florida enforced in 2022. While the fifteen-week abortion ban wasn’t ideal, the surrounding states had much stricter regulations, making Florida sort of a refugee state for people needing abortions in the south east. Now that this new six-week ban has passed, many people have found themselves unable to access abortions, or having to travel across states in order to get one. Virginia has become the next safe haven for people in need of abortions, but many residents are questioning whether or not Virginia can handle the huge rise of people coming to the state.
One of the main problems with the six-week ban is that many people don’t know they’re pregnant until around 6-8 weeks. This makes it an extremely short time window for people to identify they’re pregnant, and then get an abortion if needed. Passing abortion bans such as this one causes an influx of people trying to get abortions, while also defunding planned parenthood clinics, causing people to get illegal and unsafe abortions. These bans make no exception for rape or incest, and criminalize doctors who do preform abortions on these cases, even going as far as reviving laws from the 1800’s and making them apply to people in the 21st century.
With the overturning of Roe V. Wade, people all over the country have slowly been losing their rights to their own bodies. People who aren’t licensed with an in-depth understanding about medical science are writing laws involving medical science, displaying the lack of knowledge policy makers have when it comes to abortion laws. These abortion bans aren’t just harming people who want to get an abortion, but also people who need to terminate their pregnancy because it is no longer viable. People with life-threatening non viable pregnancies aren’t able to have a life saving procedure because lawmakers think that abortions only have one use.
Overall, abortion bans in the United States have been becoming more and more strict, stripping away rights that people deserve to have. Lawmakers who have no clue how abortions work are banning them with no second thoughts. The overturning of Roe V. Wade is causing these restrictions to become much more extreme, and there’s no telling when certain states will outright ban all abortion no matter the circumstances. People need access to abortions because it’s part of their rights to be able to choose what they want to do with their own body. States making unnecessary bans and taking away the bodily autonomy of millions of Americans is only taking us a step back, not forward.
