It was extremely good news for pro-life forces in the state of Florida to see Amendment 4 go down to defeat. That amendment would have nullified Florida’s heartbeat legislation and undermined even modest limits on abortion like parental consent for minor abortions.

But the practical impact of that measure’s defeat will affect more than just the women of Florida. Neighboring states with pro-life protections will no longer have full service abortion clinics just across the border.

Because of that, abortions will not just drop in Florida, but in neighboring states as well. And there is already evidence of this occurring.

Two groups which track monthly abortions show a big drop off in Florida abortions once that state’s heartbeat legislation went into effect May 1, 2024.

We Count, a survey conducted by the trade group Society of Family Planning, found in its latest report (10/22/24) that Florida saw a large increase in abortions just before the state enacted its 6-week ban. We observed about 8,400 abortions in January, 7,900 in February, and 8,300 in March, and then the number rose to over 10,100 abortions in April 2024. However, in subsequent months, the monthly abortion counts declined to about 6,200 in May and further down to 5,600 in June. Between March and May, Florida saw a decline of about 2,500 women who had in-person abortions.

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Guttmacher, the research institute with long standing ties to the abortion industry, says something quite similar.

In the first three months of 2024, there were approximately 8,050 clinician-provided abortions per month in Florida. After the ban went into effect, the number of clinician-provided abortions dropped to an estimated 5,630 in May (a decrease of 30% from the monthly average for January–March) and 5,200 in June (a 35% decrease from January–March).

That is good news, but not the whole story. When the Dobbs decision was handed down in June of 2022, several southern states either passed or activated protective legislation in the months that followed. These law either generally protected unborn children from abortion entirely (allowing only when necessary to preserve a mother’s life or health) or imposed some gestational limit or developmental milestone (e.g., not allowing abortion after the child’s heartbeat can be detected at six weeks after a woman’s last menstrual period).

While that was great for states such as Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, etc., Florida still had abortionists advertising and offering even late abortions just across the border. Many women facing unplanned, unwanted pregnancies simply drove or flew south to the Sunshine state.

This isn’t theoretical.  Earlier this year, the New York Times published data claiming that 11% (nearly 10,000 of Florida’s abortion clients from 2023) came from other states. The Times went so far as to show a map of arrows showing large numbers of women traveling from many of these other southern states to Florida (NY Times, 6/13/24).

There was travel in both directions, with some Florida women traveling to northern states with no limits, and some women from states with full pro-life protections traveling to states with more modest gestational limits (six or twelve weeks). But there was still a lot of traffic from the south gravitating to Florida, where there were no such limits at the time.

But the implications were plain enough. Florida’s new law got rid of a critical logistical and geographical abortion haven in the Southern U.S. that the industry had been able to use as an “oasis” in one of the country’s most expansive abortion “deserts.”

If Amendment 4 had passed, Florida would have once again become the region’s key abortion location, performing even second trimester abortions many of its neighbors would not touch.

Again, full data on the numbers, types, and gestational ages of abortions done in individual states since Dobbs may yet be months or even years away. However, hints of increased abortions that have been touted in many of these southern states in recent SFP and Guttmacher surveys in many cases depended, in large part, on women in protective states being able to travel to nearby states to have their abortions there.

At least one crucial portion of that pipeline will now remain shut down, thanks to the voters of Florida.

LifeNews.com Note: Randall O’Bannon, Ph.D., is the director of education and research for theNational Right to Life Committee. This column originally appeared at NRL News Today.