United States: Florida passed a law that bans abortions for six weeks, resultantly reducing the states’ abortions significantly and lowering the national numbers as well, according to a report.
Abortions in the state of Florida declined by over a third in a month after May when the state government passed a law that prohibited procedures beyond six weeks of pregnancy, data obtained from the research and policy organization that supports abortion- the Guttmacher Institute.
May and June abortions of 5,400 per month were recorded, although the number of abortions recorded per month was above 8,000 in the first quarter of the year, CNN Health reported.
Over the same time period, the national average monthly rate of abortion decreased by 7 percent or about 7,000 fewer abortions per month, and Florida’s contribution was over one-third of such decrease.
What more are the experts stating?
The experts state that there exist such rates by season, and there are changes in abortion rates from one month to the other.
But the changes were much more dramatic in Florida. In the other states where there was not a total abortion ban, the number of abortions dropped by only 2 percent in May and 9 percent in June, according to Guttmacher data.
These even stricter measures were expected to have a much bigger effect on Florida and other areas in the nation.
Before May, when the policy was changed, Florida accounted for roughly 11 percent of all abortions in the US and has become a key provider of abortions for the South after the US Supreme Court removed the Constitutional right to abortion in 2022, as CNN Health pointed out.