May 1 or May Day is a European festival rooted in the ancient past that celebrates the beginning of summer. In Florida however, May 1, 2024 was a day of mourning because it will be forever seen as the first day of Florida’s heartless and dangerous six-week abortion ban.
As a consequence, millions of women in the state have had their reproductive healthcare protections snatched away by Gov. Ron DeSantis, his collaborators in the Florida Legislature and the menagerie of far-right extremists, the Republican elite, MAGA supporters, Christian nationalists and white evangelicals.
On May 1, women in Florida woke up to a grim and bleak reality.
Across Florida, abortion clinics are shutting down or preparing to do so, fear and trepidation among women seeking or needing an abortion is high and clinics in North Carolina, southern Virginia, Kansas and Illinois are bracing for a surge of patients now that the last bastion of abortion access in the South has fallen.
“At the stroke of midnight, another Trump abortion ban went into effect here in Florida … and today, this very day, at the stroke of midnight, another Trump abortion ban went into effect here in Florida,” Vice President Kamala Harris told an audience at a May 1 campaign event in Jacksonville. And “starting this morning, women in Florida became subject to an abortion ban so extreme it applies before many women even know they are pregnant. Which, by the way, tells us the extremists who wrote this ban either don’t know how a women’s body works, or they simply don’t care.”
Reproductive justice, health advocates and other experts have likened the Florida and Arizona abortion bans to earthquakes which have significantly altered America’s abortion landscape.
A world away in Arizona, the Arizona Senate voted 16-14 to repeal an 1864 Civil War-era abortion law that the state Supreme Court dredged up. The long-buried law bans all abortions except those performed to save a woman’s life. Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs wasted no time in signing the repeal. One problem is that the repeal won’t go into effect until 90 days after the legislature adjourns.
The repeal also means that the state has reverted to the 15-week ban that the archaic law superseded.
MAGA stalwart and Trump acolyte Kari Lake — who initially supported the 1864 law’s near-total ban on abortions — has flip-flopped on her position so many times and her support has severely damaged her prospects of winning the U.S. senate seat.
Anti-abortion forces, white evangelicals and others in that camp have made it clear that political ideology is decidedly more important than women’s lives; women have little value in their world or thinking which made it easy for them to orchestrate the theft of their rights. They seem unconcerned with making abortion care and access illegal or that women and teens and children who are raped by friends, strangers and family have no protection because of them.
What DeSantis and his far-right allies have been doing is part and parcel of a multi-pronged national strategy embraced and employed by America’s white conservative minority who are determined to ensure that a rising multiracial governing majority — comprised of African Americans, brown people and Democrats — never gets close to the levers of power.
The battle will be fierce
As we move into November, politically, the battlelines are drawn.
Both sides of this momentous, consequential and calamitous issue are wrestling each other and over the next six months, the battle will be fierce. The results of the November elections will show clearly which side triumphs.
This war on women is the most recent battle for America’s soul, if it has one. There’s a great deal at stake.
For a…
This article was originally published by a floridaphoenix.com . Read the Original article here. .