This story was written by one of Teen Vogue's 2024 Student Correspondents, a team of college students covering the election cycle from key battleground states.
When Trenece Robertson got her positive pregnancy test in the spring of 2019, she was visiting Florida with her partner at the time. "I just started college at that point," Robertson recalls. She was a sophomore and was contemplating transferring to Florida A&M University in Tallahassee.
"I take a pregnancy test, positive. And I'm like, that's so funny. I take another one, positive," she said. "I won't lie, I felt a lot of things," Robertson, who's originally from Louisiana, told Teen Vogue.
An ultrasound at a Tallahassee Planned Parenthood location showed that she was already six weeks pregnant. "It was a hard decision. I remember I cried a lot," Robertson says of her choice to have an abortion. If she'd needed one today — just over one month after a six-week abortion ban started in Florida — she would've been turned away.
On May 1, a six-week abortion ban and a 24-hour waiting period came into effect in Florida, severely limiting abortion access for people both in Florida and across the Southeastern United States. Politico reports that more than 80,000 people get abortions in Florida each year, and last year, 12,000 of those were for people from out of state. For a month now, providers, abortion funds and, most importantly, people seeking to get an abortion in Florida have struggled to navigate an increasingly restrictive landscape.
"I wanted to be a parent, but I knew realistically, I couldn't have taken care of a child," says Robertson, who is now a Tallahassee-based political organizer and reproductive rights advocate. "I don't know if I could've handled that while also trying to be the first person in my family to get her bachelor's [degree]."
Since the Dobbs decision in 2022, most states in the Southeast have passed laws to restrict or ban abortions. For the last two years, Florida was a resource for many people in the region seeking to have an abortion. Now, Florida has joined Georgia and South Carolina in adopting a six-week ban; only allowing a few exceptions in case of life-threatening medical emergencies, rape, or incest.
"Most girls don't even know that they are pregnant until they're around six weeks," says Candace Dye, the owner and administrator of Woman's World Medical Center, an abortion clinic in Fort Pierce Florida. "And of course, if they know that they're pregnant at six weeks, it's already too late," Dye says.
Patients often drive long distances to seek care at Dye’s clinic, and in the past month, many of those who didn't know about the law were turned away.
"People who get turned away are in shock and cry. They say 'I have to go home and have a baby now?' When they didn't even want to have a baby in the first place." In the first 20 days of the ban, Dye says, her clinic had to turn away around 75% of their patients.
Even people who know about the law might face challenges to get an abortion due to the clinic's limited capacity and lack of available trained personnel. Woman's World Medical Center can only provide abortions on Mondays and Saturdays, the only days their doctor is available. And, sometimes it’s too early to detect a pregnancy via ultrasound, which can impede abortion care.
"We've had a lot of patients who know about the law and come in early. But it's so early —because they tested positive — that we can't see anything in them so we have to send them home," Dye says. In Florida, patients seeking an abortion are required to get an ultrasound first, even if it’s not medically necessary, according to the Guttmacher Institute. The Cleveland Clinic notes that an embryo can be detected via ultrasound as early as six weeks — meaning earlier ultrasounds might miss it.
While Florida was once a more lenient option among Southern states that had completely banned abortion, patients in the region may now need to travel, according to some estimates, upwards to 1000 miles to get an abortion.
North Carolina — now the most lenient state in the region— currently has a 12-week abortion ban. And while many patients have already sought care in the state, North Carolina also enforces a 72-hour waiting period, which Stephanie Loraine, executive director of Florida Access Network, the largest abortion fund in the state, says increases the logistical and financial burden for people seeking abortion in that state. "That doesn't make it accessible for everybody who may need the support," Loraine told Teen Vogue.
Because of this, most of the abortion funds (organizations that help people pay for and, at times, travel to get an abortion) that Teen Vogue reached out to agree that places like Philadelphia, Virginia, Illinois, Maryland and Washington D.C. are more viable alternatives despite the higher travel distances.
"We are very busy. It's been a very hectic month with a lot of demand coming our way," says Christine Montero, a healthline coordinator with the Access Reproductive Southeast (ARC-Southeast) abortion fund.
ARC-Southeast provides financial and logistical support for people in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, and South Carolina. They serve one of the most restrictive regions for abortion care in the country
"Even before the ban went into effect on May 1, the demand was high, and we were helping a lot of folks from Florida," she says. "But right now it is, there's just been a massive surge."
"We're talking about people who are coming from the most southern parts of the United States, it's not just a simple drive away," says Vic K, a healthline coordinator with ARC-Southeast who asked that only the first letter of their last name be used for privacy.
Most people seeking ARC-Southeast's support are Black, Indigenous, Hispanic, and Latinx, K says, communities that are disproportionately impacted by abortion bans. They also tend to already have children, K says, making the logistical and financial burden of traveling out-of-state even higher.
“They have to secure childcare, they have to secure travel, they have to secure lodging, and there's a lot more cost that goes into it," says K. "It's not even just a simple flight. I was helping a caller today, and there were no nonstop flights from her area. So we had to do a lot of connecting flights, which is completely doable. But, consider other barriers being there. Like if there was a language barrier, if someone is physically disabled," they say.
For many providers and advocates, the role of abortion funds and options like self-provided abortions through abortion pills and telehealth, are only provisional alternatives to secure people's agency over their bodies.
"These bans are doing what they're meant to do, which is keep folks from getting abortions. But we're going to be here helping folks get the health care they need regardless until we can eliminate these bans," Montero says.
For people like Montero, there is still hope: Amendment 4, a November ballot question, could enshrine the right to abortion in the Florida constitution.
After the fall of Roe, Trenece Robertson got involved in the reproductive rights space, sharing her abortion experience and helping others navigate this challenging space. She, along with many other Florida organizers, managed to collect almost a million signatures to get the Amendment 4 ballot in place. She hopes change comes sooner rather than later.
"This is the starting point to restoring Roe v. Wade," Robertson says. "Also, this is our chance to make sure that all the people in the South actually have access. Pay more attention to Amendment 4 [because] it doesn't just affect Florida, it affects the entire South," she says. "That's why it's right to vote. And also, don't give up on the South. We're not hopeless."
