The sky was still dark outside the clinic, but two women were already sitting quietly in the small, beige waiting room while Candace Dye and her staff prepared for an extremely busy morning. It was a few minutes past 5 a.m. on one of the last days it would be legal to get an abortion until 15 weeks of pregnancy in Florida, and A Woman’s World Medical Center in Fort Pierce was completely booked.
“I just can’t believe it’s actually going to happen,” Ms. Dye said.
Starting on Wednesday, Florida will ban abortions after six weeks, a dramatic change in a state that less than two years ago allowed the procedure up to about 24 weeks. Prohibiting it at six weeks, when many women do not yet know that they are pregnant, will further restrict access to abortion in the Deep South where a number of other states have near-total bans, and force many patients to travel much farther for care.
Ms. Dye, 67, opened her independent clinic in Fort Pierce, about 130 miles north of Miami on Florida’s Atlantic Coast, in 1991. Now she wondered if she would have to lay off two people from her modest staff or possibly close her doors. She hopes to carry on until November, at least, when Florida voters will decide whether to amend the State Constitution to guarantee access to abortion “before viability,” or about 24 weeks.
“I’m not ready to give up,” she said.
It was Saturday, one of the two days a week when a doctor came to the clinic to prescribe medication abortions and provide surgical ones, back to back to back, before heading to another clinic further south.
Several young men stood on the sidewalk in front of the clinic, a house painted light green on a corner lot near downtown Fort Pierce, a city of about 48,000. They held large anti-abortion signs, approached cars as they pulled into the parking lot and hollered at patients as they walked in, or sometimes through the clinic’s closed windows.
“You don’t have to kill that beautiful baby this morning!” one of the protesters, Chayse Cloonan, 25, said as a woman scooted by him.
Directly across the street from A Woman’s World is an anti-abortion pregnancy center run by a Catholic charity, the nation’s abortion divide playing out at a single intersection. In 2010, HBO produced a documentary about the clinic and center titled, “12th & Delaware,” after the intersecting streets.
Another such center, painted pink and called Woman’s Care Center, is two blocks away. Ms. Dye said that some patients mistakenly parked at one of the two anti-abortion centers, not realizing that they had entered the wrong place until they start being counseled not to end their pregnancies. Such centers often provide baby supplies and social services referrals and, depending on the center, nonmedical-grade ultrasounds.
To guide patients into A Woman’s World, volunteers wearing neon pink vests met them at their cars and led them to the front door, putting themselves between the patients and protesters.
Protesters show up every Saturday morning and Monday afternoon, aware of the clinic’s procedure schedule. On Saturday, they knew nearly down to the minute when Ms. Dye’s husband would drive out of the clinic’s one-car garage to pick up the doctor, a practice that Ms. Dye said began many years ago after the killings of several abortion doctors across the country.
The doctor arrived in the passenger seat of the car with a white sheet draped over his head to cover his face. By then, it was nearly 8 a.m., and the waiting room was so crowded that several women were standing in the corners and behind the front door.
Jerneka Davis, 20, smiled a tight smile as she walked past the protesters.
She was five weeks pregnant, she said, and still in school while waiting tables. “I’m not ready” to be a parent, she added. “This was not in my plans this year.”
She was grateful to have gotten a consultation the previous Saturday, and to have returned a week later to begin a medication abortion, which involves taking two medications 24 to 48 hours apart. (Florida has a 24-hour waiting period for both medication and surgical abortions, requiring two visits.)
“It means that I have a choice in this world with my body,” Ms. Davis said.
“I believe in God, too,” she added, referring to the protesters, “but I feel like sometimes people have to do what they have to do.”
Another woman, named Farrah, declined to give her last name to protect her privacy. She said that she was 35, worked full time and had two toddlers at home.
“I don’t want any more kids,” she said.
Farrah said she was seven weeks pregnant and had realized her condition earlier than in her prior two pregnancies. Had she not been able to get her appointment on Saturday, she said, “I would have gone out of state.”
She said she feared that the six-week ban would drive women to illegal abortions: “I’d rather have a safe option.”
Until now, most abortions in Florida have taken place later than six weeks of pregnancy. The new law will replace a 15-week abortion ban that Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law in April 2022, shortly before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Later on Saturday morning, as patients left the clinic, protesters encouraged them not to take their abortion pills, or to “repent” if they had already completed the procedure. One patient got into the driver’s seat of an S.U.V., where a man had waited for hours along with a dog and baby in a car seat.
Ms. Dye said that A Woman’s World performed more than 700 abortions last year, out of the nearly 84,000 that took place in Florida. Most patients are 18 to 36, she said, though one of the patients on Saturday was 43. The oldest patient the clinic has ever provided with an abortion was 51; the youngest was 11.
In 1988, while in recovery for a drug addiction and after a stint in prison, Ms. Dye found a job as a receptionist at an abortion clinic in nearby Port St. Lucie. Taking calls from women looking for help gave her purpose, she said, and she credited her work with keeping her sober since.
“If I have to close my doors,” she said, “I’m going to open a halfway house for women in recovery.”
But she hopes that it will not come to that. Her husband, daughter, granddaughter and niece all work at the clinic. Ms. Dye has set up a fund-raising page and plans to keep the clinic open, providing ultrasounds and abortions up to six weeks, for as long as she can pay the bills.
On Monday, she answered a call from a woman nine weeks along who wanted to end her pregnancy. She told her she would not be able to help her, and that she would almost certainly have to seek an abortion outside of Florida.
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