How far will Florida women be forced to travel for an abortion now?

A ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy went into effect in Florida on Wednesday. Because of a 2023 law passed by Florida’s Republican state legislature and signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis this week, most women will now be ineligible for the procedure before they even know they are pregnant.

A 2021 study from the University of California in San Francisco found that as many as a third of all women in the US discover their pregnancies at or after six weeks into the gestational process. The Florida ban has extremely limited exceptions: abortion is only allowed to save the life of the mother, or in cases where the pregnancy would cause “substantial and irreversible” bodily harm.

Thanks to realities of US politics across the deep south, Floridians seeking abortion procedures have another factor stacked against them: geography. Conservative governments in neighboring Alabama and Georgia, as well as further on into South Carolina and Mississippi, have all either passed anti-abortion laws recently or seen so-called “trigger bans” go into effect with the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v Wade in 2022.

The closest state to Florida with looser restrictions on abortion is North Carolina, 640 miles away. Driving from Miami, Florida to Charlotte, North Carolina takes just under 11 hours each way. Two-hour direct flights are possible between some cities in the two states, although flights are sometimes contraindicated after a medical procedure.

A purple state, unlike its neighbor to the south, North Carolina also has an abortion ban in place — but after 12 weeks into the pregnancy.

The nearest state to Florida that doesn’t have what Planned Parenthood calls “severe restrictions” and instead has “mostly