The Florida Supreme Court put legislation mandating a 24-hour waiting period for abortion on hold on Friday, according to the Tampa Bay Times. It is latest salvo in a legal battle that began after the measure passed last year. The ruling was 5–2 in favor of temporarily stopping the waiting period from going into effect while the court decides if it will hear a case on whether the waiting period is unconstitutional.
The law requires a woman to see a doctor in person an entire day before she gets an abortion. The ACLU and Bread and Roses Women’s Health Center, an abortion clinic based in Gainesville, sued the state last year, claiming that it infringes on privacy rights under the state constitution. This recent ruling is a win for those groups, which were dealt a legal blow in February when a three-judge panel of the First District Court of Appeals ruled to allow the law to go forward.
It has become fairly common for states to pass laws requiring a 24-hour waiting period for abortions — as many as 28 states require women who want an abortion to wait a certain period of time, most often 24 hours, according to the Guttmacher Institute. To make matters worse, 14 states require women to make two separate trips to the clinic in order to get an abortion. South Dakota, Missouri, and Oklahoma require patients to wait 72 hours for an abortion.
These waiting periods have been shown to cause financial and emotional hardship for women, according to a 2013 study from the Texas Policy Evaluation Project that surveyed over 300 women who sought an abortion in Texas in 2012. For example, participants in the study traveled an average of 42 miles to get to the nearest clinic and others traveled as far as 400 miles away to meet the requirements of the law. Women also had to spend additional money due to the 24-hour waiting period since they needed to pay for more transportation or to find someone to watch other children while they sought the counseling required for the law, just to name a few hardships.
Women also reported feeling equally confident about their decision to get an abortion after the counseling, so it stands to reason that the law is only offering hardship rather than a time for reflection, as conservative lawmakers argue. According to a 2014 American Journal of Public Health study, travel and procedure costs were the most common reason why women experienced a delay in getting an abortion. Research released in 2013 from the University of California, San Francisco found that one week after getting an abortion, the vast majority of women said they felt relieved.
What makes these waiting periods particularly onerous is that there are increasingly more restrictions on abortion clinics, which means there are fewer clinics and thus longer wait times and longer trips to get there. The 24-hour or longer waiting period only exacerbates the problem by making women wait even longer and incur more costs.