Wednesday has entered into force in Florida, in the United States, a law prohibits abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy, except in rare cases: it is a moment of pregnancy in which many women do not know they are pregnant, given that six weeks is equivalent to two weeks late of the cycle.
This ban on abortion is not only problematic for the inhabitants of Florida, a state with more than 22 million people, but also for all those who from neighboring states went to Florida for an abortion, where before today it was possible to terminate a pregnancy until fifteenth week (in Italy they are up to the twelfth freely). At the moment there are 17 states of the United States that completely ban abortion or allow it only up to the sixth week and are almost all located in the south-east of the country: according to data from the State Agency for Health Care Administration, in 2023 almost 8 thousand women they had come to Florida from neighboring states for abortions, nearly 10 percent of all abortions performed that year.
However, the citizens of Florida could eliminate this ban at the beginning of November, when together with the vote in the presidential elections they will also be able to express themselves through a referendum on a popular initiative law which proposes to include the right to abortion up to 24 weeks of pregnancy in the state Constitution. So far all state referendums to protect the right to abortion have been approved by the population, but none had a threshold as high as that of Florida: for the proposal to be approved, the favorable vote of 60 percent of voters will be required.