Prices aren’t going down. “Excuseflation,” explained.
New inflation numbers were released Wednesday. TL;DR: while the rate of price increases is slowing down, it remains stubbornly high.
The most common traditional explanation is an imbalance between supply and demand — “too much money chasing after too few goods,” as Milton Friedman put it. Most economists say that the supply chain disruptions contribute as well. But supply chain problems have eased in recent months, easing some supply concerns, and the Federal Reserve has been steadily raising interest rates, slowing job growth as a way to balance out the demand part of the equation. So why are prices still so high?
Tracy Alloway, a Bloomberg journalist and co-host of the financial podcast Odd Lots, thinks the answer may be, in part, the fact that many companies are increasingly turning to a strategy known as “price over volume.”
Translate that into plain English and you get something like “chasing fat profits.”
“So you’re selling fewer products, but you’re selling them at higher prices,” Alloway told Today, Explained co-host Noel King on a recent episode of the show. “It’s a viable strategy in the current environment.”
Today, Explained spoke to Alloway about this corporate strategy and the reasoning they use to justify price hikes to their customers in the first place, a phenomenon she’s dubbed “excuseflation.”
Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so find Today, Explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen.
You recently identified a phenomenon that you call “excuseflation.” Tell me what it means.
I think a lot of people at this point have heard about this idea that companies, you know, maybe they’re taking advantage of the current environment in order to raise prices and really gouging their customers.
The thing about excuseflation is it’s sort of grounded in truth. It’s the idea that companies are using these once-in-a-lifetime disruptions. Think about the supply chain hiccups that we’ve had. Think about the Ukraine-Russia war. And they’re using those one-off disruptions as an excuse to raise prices. And that sounds fair enough. You know, companies, they have expenses. If their input costs go up, maybe it makes sense for them to pass some of those on to customers. But where it starts to become insidious is when they’re raising prices so much that they’re seeing their profits go up quite substantially as well.
Can you give me an example of something that has been excuseflated?
Sure. So one of my favorite examples, because, you know, I love these personally, but chicken wings. Let’s talk about chicken wings and Wingstop. Wingstop is a very large purveyor of very delicious chicken wings. And what they’ve been saying on their earnings calls is that they have been raising their prices for their delicious chicken wings. And the reason they’ve been doing that is because the wholesale cost of your basic chicken wing went up quite a lot during the pandemic. We had a lot of disruptions at various farms, chicken farms with labor shortages and things like that. So it made sense that chicken wing prices went up and the company started passing those on to consumers.
The issue now, though, is that we have seen a substantial drop in chicken wing prices. And yet the company isn’t saying that it’s going to start dropping its prices. What it’s discovered, much like a lot of other businesses at the moment, is that actually this strategy of making up what you lose in sales volume with higher prices, so you’re selling fewer products, but you’re selling them at higher prices, [is] a viable strategy in the current environment, and it’s working for a lot of companies because profit margins are up.
Listen, you are an economics reporter. You see what’s happening. You are still buying chicken wings. Why are you not furious? Why have you not put your foot down?
First of all, let me say that my personal price elasticity when it comes to chicken wings is probably infinite. But, you know, I will pay whatever it takes to eat Buffalo wings.
Wingstop is listening!
We spoke to the owner of a bakery over in Chicago. And, you know, I think there’s a tendency when you think about things like greedflation or excuseflation, you think about these big corporations, these really sophisticated corporations that are, you know, formulating their pricing strategies and how to get the most out of customers. But this is a phenomenon that also is endemic in smaller and midsize businesses. And this baker in Chicago kind of laid it out for us. He said:
Whether it’s rye flour or bird flu, that impacts eggs when it makes national news just running a business, it’s an opportunity to increase the prices without getting a whole bunch of complaining from the customers. It’s not that we’re out there price gouging, but, you know, timing can be everything. —Ken Jarosch, owner of Jarosch bakery, as heard on Odd Lots
Shouldn’t competition push prices down? If I’m a business owner, I’m going to let consumers know that I can get them stuff much cheaper than the other guys who have excuseflated everything. Shouldn’t that be happening?
This is really the key thing about excuseflation and where it differs a little bit from greedflation. If a company starts raising its prices just because it can, then in theory, according to the basic rules of capitalism and economics, someone should come in and undercut them and steal all their business away. But the thing about excuseflation is it allows companies to raise prices all at the same time and all together.
The economist Isabella Weber, she basically says what it does is it gives companies de facto monopoly power. So you think about the reason that we tend not to like monopolies as consumers. We want, you know, a vibrant landscape of lots of smaller businesses that are all competing with each other so that we get a better value for our money. What happens when you have an industry-wide event that gives a group of businesses an excuse to raise prices: They are all effectively, not officially, but effectively acting as a monopoly. They can all say, well, you know, it’s bird flu, so we’re all going to raise the prices of our eggs.
When it comes to specific company examples, you know, Pepsi has been pushing their prices higher for a while. And you would think that, well, customers can just buy Coke instead, but actually Coke is pretty much doing the same thing. And so you end up having these industries who are all acting together. And that means that there’s very little incentive for them to start lowering prices because they’re not seeing that competitive pressure.
We tend to think of monopoly power as this, you know, kind of static thing. So you might have one big company that dominates an industry, and that’s a classic monopoly. Consumers don’t have a lot of other options. But, in fact, monopoly power can be a fluid and temporary thing. So when you see a supply bottleneck or when you see an industry-wide disruption, it can lead to this situation where companies all start acting very similarly. They all start doing the same thing.
It’s almost, you know, I hesitate to use these words because they have legal connotations, but it’s almost like a de facto cartel, right? Everyone decides to raise their prices all at once because whatever crucial component or input cost is going up. That leads to an automatic monopoly. It feels the same to a consumer who finds that, actually, they don’t have a lot of options because one group of businesses is raising their prices all together, all at the same time.
The myths, mess, and creepy magic of Ari Aster’s latest nightmare.
Warning: Spoilers for Beau Is Afraid follow. Lots of spoilers. Proceed at your own risk!
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I have this recurring dream — a nightmare, really — where I’m trying to go somewhere, I must be there, I simply must, but people keep making me late, and no matter what I do, I can’t make any progress. It’s terrible. I hate it.
It’s also kind of the plot of Beau Is Afraid, a demented unraveling of the hero’s journey from Ari Aster, the guy who brought you Hereditary, Midsommar, some stuff you can never forget seeing. It is not, properly, a horror movie, though there’s horrifying stuff in it. It’s more of a nightmare movie, in which our main character, Beau (Joaquin Phoenix), is just having a pretty bad time of it. If it’s about anything, it’s about guilt. It’s what would happen if all the stuff you worry about in your therapist’s office — that everyone was mad at you, that you’re a huge disappointment to your parents, that you’ll get accused of doing something wrong and not even know what it is — was true. At every turn, the worst thing happens.
Obviously, it’s great and I love it, and a lot of people won’t. And that’s fine. It’s manifestly not for everyone.
Beau Is Afraid is also, I think, the least scrutable of Aster’s three features. You know what’s happening, but you’re never totally sure why or what’s important to remember. Backtracking over the plot, you can start to see the outlines emerging, some themes, some breadcrumbs scattered throughout. There are little rabbit trails you can trace, jokes to notice in the background (the signs scattered throughout this movie are a rich source of humor), part of why your second viewing of the movie might be richer than the first.
Yet it’s important to remember that Beau Is Afraid is not a puzzle to be solved or a mystery to be unlocked. That’s by design. Sink into it and don’t try to pick it apart, and you’ll get it. Get stuck on the details and you’ll lose the plot. So to speak.
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A24
If you really want to wrap your head around Beau, though, there are two main things to keep in mind. One is the promise of the title: that this is a movie about a guy named Beau, and he is afraid. And not even afraid of something specific, but afraid in a chaotically multidirectional manner. If it’s out there, Beau is afraid of it.
The other is that this is a funhouse mirror version of the classic hero’s journey story, as codified by Joseph Campbell, sometimes called the “monomyth.” In its normal state, the hero’s journey is a narrative archetype for a particular kind of classic story. Think of, say, Odysseus, or Frodo in The Lord of the Rings: A hero is called out of his familiar life and armed by some supernatural power to embark on an adventure. He crosses the threshold into an unknown world, where he encounters helpers and mentors, challenges and temptations that he must overcome, and ultimately a moment of revelation, where he stares into an abyss and is reborn. Having been transformed, he must atone for himself, and then can return home with a gift. At home, everything is familiar but changed because the hero himself is changed. Now, he has freedom to live.
Aster, being Aster, has turned the whole thing inside out. But you can discern the outlines of the monomyth inside Beau Is Afraid, perhaps in a hilarious reinforcement of Campbell’s sense that the hero’s journey is built into the human heart. The ways it disintegrates into chaos is what makes it comitragical, or tragicomical. It’s funny and messed up, and that’s what makes it great.
Act 1: The Departure
At core, Beau Is Afraid is the tale of a very lost soul named Beau Wasserman, the only son of his mother Mona Wasserman (played at different ages by Zoe Lister-Jones and Patti Lupone), a business maven who raised him on her own in their town of Wasserton. Throughout his childhood, Beau was his mother’s companion; he appeared in her advertisements, absorbed all her attention, was the focus of her life. She presented him with a world of dangers, in which she was his safe guide, and maybe his only safe guide.
Now paunchy and middle-aged, Beau is the saddest of sacks living in the worst neighborhood you could possibly imagine, even if you’ve personally lived in a very bad neighborhood indeed. (It’s called Corrina, in the fictional state of Corrina, but resembles more than anything a Fox News fever dream of what a city is like.) His apartment is over a store called “Erectus Ejectus” (you get it) and the lobby is filled with obscene graffiti. Corpses rot in the streets. One local seems to spend a lot of time trying to dig people’s eyeballs out of their skulls while grinning maniacally.
This is Beau’s familiar starting place — well, rewind. Not quite. The movie actually starts with Beau’s birth, which is presented as a moment of bewilderment from baby Beau’s point of view. It was safe and quiet inside Mona, but bursting into the world is so terrifying that he can’t even cry.
Adult Beau is scared of most things, and his psychiatrist (Stephen McKinley Henderson) does not make a great deal of headway with him, prescribing him a “cool new drug” for anxiety that must be taken with water. Beau’s dismal apartment is loud and dingy, and next to the TV where he watches anxiety-inducing news bulletins is a stack of books with titles like You Don’t Always Have to Live Like This. There are posters on the doors with warnings of a brown recluse spider, concluded, spectacularly, with a Winston Churchill quote: “The price of greatness is responsibility.” The place sucks. The water goes out.
In one of the first hints that this world is not all it seems to be, Beau falls asleep the night before he’s meant to fly home to visit his mother. He wakes to a note slipped under his door courteously asking him to turn down his music, although he not only isn’t playing music (Beau is not really the night-rocking type), but can’t hear music playing at all. Notes appear over the night, increasingly aggressive, till suddenly Beau can hear the music — it still isn’t coming from his place — and just crawls under the covers and plugs his ears, hoping it will all go away.
Of course, he oversleeps.
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A24
This is the pattern of Beau Is Afraid: something kind of weird happens, and instead of dealing with it, Beau just knuckles under, and then ends up paying a worse price for his lack of courage than seems strictly necessary. There are 10 ways every situation could go wrong, but inevitably what happens is some 11th worse thing.
On his rush out the door, Beau goes back to grab a small box of dental floss that he almost packed the night before — we watched him hesitate over it — but elected to leave in his bathroom. Now he needs it; this is a man who has been made to be afraid of terrible things happening, like missing one day of flossing and ending up with gum cancer or something. But when he does this, his keys disappear, as does his bag, and now he’s in a real pickle because of course he can’t leave his door unlocked, “open to the public,” as he thinks of it. Calling home, he discovers his worst fears are true: His mother is immensely disappointed with him. Another nightmare.
The way to watch Beau Is Afraid is to assume that you’re not watching “reality,” in a kind of empirical sense. Instead, whatever’s happening onscreen is the worst thing that Beau can imagine. Those fears start to compound and overlap and make one another worse. And it all gets especially worse when he takes his anti-anxiety meds, only to realize that the water is out in his building and if he doesn’t drink water he’ll die, but oh there’s water in the convenience store across the street, but if he runs out without his keys what if the entire neighborhood of derelicts breaks into his apartment, what then? What will he do!?
He does the only thing he can do to stay alive, and what he expects to happen is exactly what happens, and Beau spends the night trapped on scaffolding outside his apartment, too scared to clear the invaders out. It’s very clear that this particular not-hero (not an antihero, even, just profoundly not a hero) is going to need a boot in the butt to get on his journey to see his mother.
Then, on the phone with a UPS guy at his mother’s house, he discovers his mother is dead. Or at least it looks that way.
Now he’s got a whole other set of problems and is even less inclined to leave his house until forced to by an unexpected tangle with the man hiding in his ceiling. Nude, Beau runs into the street, encounters a cop who’s also shaking with fear and about to shoot him and, almost mercifully, gets slammed by some kind of van driven by Grace (Amy Ryan) and Roger (Nathan Lane).
Beau has crossed the threshold.
Act 2: Initiation
After sleeping for two days straight, Beau wakes up in Grace and Roger’s house, and at this point you might be starting to suspect a little of what’s going to happen. They seem nice enough, but things in their house seem kind of weird. There’s a shrine to their dead son, killed in action in Caracas — a true hero — whose disturbed buddy Jeeves (Denis Menochet), also a hero (as they frequently tell him) lives out back. As if stuck in a ridiculous foil, Beau has been put up in their teenage daughter Toni’s (Kylie Rogers) room, postered with tributes to K-pop boy bands, rather than their son’s empty room. And Toni is pissed about it. Hints she drops suggest that Grace and Roger are trying to adopt Beau, a man who is very obviously not of adoptable age.
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A24
Meanwhile, Beau gets a call from his mother’s lawyer (Richard Kind) who bellows at him over the phone that his poor mother, who should have been buried the day she died by Jewish custom, has been stuck unburied because Beau hasn’t bothered to show up yet. Beau’s biggest fear: that his mother will be ashamed and disgraced, and it will be his fault, and he won’t even be able to help it. His protestations that he got into a horrible accident have no effect. The lawyer orders him to come immediately to Wasserton so his mother won’t be further humiliated.
Beau tries. He really tries. Roger promises to take him to Wasserton, then postpones. Grace slips him strange notes about not incriminating himself. It’s as if Beau is being given a series of tests — like a hero would — that, if passed, will teach him valuable lessons. But he just keeps slipping down a hall of mirrors, each stranger than the last.
The big moment, where he might have a profound revelation, comes when Toni and a friend trick him into smoking some kind of joint (he asks what it is; “it’s three things,” they reply, with no further elaboration) and Beau spirals. But no; nothing. The next day, he discovers that there’s some kind of surveillance system in the house.
It comes to a head when Toni drags him into her dead brother’s room, insisting he help her paint — though he knows Grace doesn’t want the room touched — and then screams at him, hysterically, that this is a test. He isn’t passing it, and she drinks paint, and he flees.
A Respite, Gone Wrong
Then there’s an interlude, where you start to wonder if maybe things are looking up for Beau. Having run into the woods, he meets a pregnant young woman (Hayley Squires) who tends to his cuts and brings him to a little commune of players, all of whom are orphans. They travel around putting on plays, and they’re about to put on another.
And of course, the play is the hero’s journey. Beau becomes transfixed, hypnotized, inserting himself into what he’s watching, which starts out like the archetypal tale and then starts to kind of go off the rails. (This is also when the movie spins out into an artfully animated section, with Beau styled as a hero going through an animated world.) Eventually, the tale wraps into reality (well, “reality”), and the hero version of Beau walks into a woods where a play is going on that seems to be about him and his three sons.
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A24
Pause here to note that Beau has experienced a series of flashbacks and memories throughout the action thus far. There are two main categories. One is a dream he has, in which he sees his mother trying to undress him for the bath, as a boy, as he refuses. She’s livid at him. The dream expands; eventually he sees her shutting someone up in the attic.
The other is definitely a memory: Young Beau (Arman Nahapetian), on a cruise with his mother, meets a girl named Elaine (Julia Antonelli), on whom he develops a crush. His attraction to her is noticeable to his mother, who seems both pleased and a little strange about it. Elaine kisses Beau and then, in a weird twist, is removed from the cruise by her mother. Before she leaves, she gives him a Polaroid he took of her and makes him promise to “wait” for her. He promises.
That’s linked to a third weird thing, which is Beau’s belief — because his mother told him, as a boy — that if he ejaculates, he will die. His father, she tells him, died the night that he was conceived; the same happened to his grandfather and great-grandfather. Beau believes her, without question, and so he claims at his age that he’s never been with anyone, ever.
So how he has three sons is not exactly clear, but the confusion seems to clear his head and he’s back to watching the play. He meets a man in the woods who claims to have known his father, which seems impossible. Or is it? Before he can figure it out, Jeeves comes crashing through the underbrush, and Beau is off running again.
Act III: Return
At last, Beau makes it to his mother’s house. But he is too late. The funeral is over. The house is empty. He walks through it, bereft, examining what his mother’s life was. In the middle of a long gallery of photos of Beau on Mona’s spiral staircase wall, there’s a recent photo of Beau, so recent that we’ve seen it before. Mona’s whole life seems to have been wrapped around Beau.
Then a woman shows up, and it’s Elaine (Parker Posey), and in a moment where you think that maybe Beau is about to receive some hero’s reward, they have sex. He is astonished to discover that he doesn’t die. He is elated. He is grateful. And then, he is horrified to discover that she … does die. And his mother, apparently not dead, has been watching all this time. And, worse, she’s heard his therapy tapes, in which he routinely talks about her. It’s the kind of dream you are desperate to wake up from.
What transpires is a final confrontation with his mother (whom Elaine referred to as “the dragon”), a final ordeal he must face, and he simply does not nail it. She excoriates him, and he finds himself inside his very, very worst nightmare: that his mother isn’t just mad at him for missing his flight, but has ascribed myriad slights and ill intent to actions he performed unwittingly, even when he was a boy, even when he was a baby. He is wrong and has been wrong his whole life, a passive lump without a will of his own, so scared of the world that he never does anything at all. She hates him, she says. And he chokes her.
You can watch Beau Is Afraid very carefully and get near the end and still have a whole lot of questions.
For instance: Is that Beau’s father in the attic? And if the answer is yes, what is Beau’s father in the attic: the giant phallus, or the guy who Beau briefly sees before his horror takes over?
Or: Is Beau actually being Truman Showed by his mother, living in a world that’s totally set up by her? Did she deliberately create for him a world in which he would disappoint her, or did she create a world in which he might succeed, and he disappointed her anyhow? Both seem possible. She’s in cahoots with the therapist; she employs at least Elaine and Roger, and maybe Grace (she knows about the surveillance channel); the housing complex he lives in was advertised by her. Every moment of his life is on her walls, sometimes in the form of advertisements. After Elaine’s untimely demise, Beau seems on the verge of asking whether Elaine was a plant all this time, “from the beginning.” And there’s that photo on the staircase.
Or is that just Beau’s head playing tricks on him? Does it even make sense to ask that question?
There are other little mysteries that lead you down strange pathways. But to get too swept up in them is probably a fool’s errand. Beau Is Afraid is not “about” something, exactly; it’s not a movie with a point to make or a puzzle to unlock. It’s weird and offensive and wickedly funny and confusing as hell. That, for me, is what makes it worthwhile; it’s entertainment that respects my ability to be confused and uncomfortable and also have a blast.
It’s really no wonder that the last section of Beau Is Afraid — the “road back” sequence, in the hero’s journey mythology — goes so horribly wrong. Beau pilots a little boat onto the peaceful night waters he’s seen in his dream, and into a cave, and you think he is maybe about to return home, having learned a lesson. But nope! The lights come on and he’s in a stadium where everyone can judge him, especially his mother and her lawyer. (This scene seems to borrow heavily from Albert Brooks’s Defending Your Life, which Aster picked for a series on his Beau influences.) He has a defense lawyer, true, but it’s a limp defense — the phone number emblazoned above the lawyer’s head is 1-800-DEFENCE, presumably because they couldn’t get the S — and the lawyer ends up splattered on a rock in a moment a bit reminiscent of Midsommar.
Defeated, Beau never reaches home. Or maybe this is his home. In his last moments, his eyes, full of sadness, also reach some resignation. Of course this is how things end; of course things will never get better. Beau has confronted the dragon and failed. He’s not transformed. He can’t atone for himself. He’s failed the tests. He’s given away any gift he received. He’s refused to gain courage, refused the help of friends, and discovered that every mentor along the way was a trap. His mother constructed a world so airtight he never actually learned to breathe, and now, faced with a twisted mirror of his life, one in which his main sin is passivity, he is out of chances to act.
Beau will never change. And so, he just combusts.
Which might be one way the movie reclaims the hero’s journey. Now, at any rate, he’s free.
Beau Is Afraid opens in limited theaters on April 13, and wide on April 20.
Ron DeSantis, gearing up for a presidential bid, signed the 6-week ban late Thursday night.
Last summer, just days after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a new law in Florida took effect that banned abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, down from the previous legal threshold of 24 weeks.
On Thursday, the state took even more aggressive action against reproductive freedom: Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill that would restrict abortion at six weeks of pregnancy. The bill will not take effect until after a court challenge to the 15-week ban is resolved.
In practical terms, this is a total ban: Many people do not even know they’re pregnant at six weeks. Even if they are aware, the Florida requirement to obtain an abortion — two in-person doctor visits with a 24-hour waiting period in between — is a challenging logistical burden at 15 weeks and would be nearly impossible at six.
The ban, if it takes effect, not only would decimate what’s left of abortion access for residents in Florida, but also significantly would curtail care for women across the South, who have been traveling to Florida from more restrictive states since Roe was overturned last summer. Annie Filkowski, the policy director of Florida Alliance of Planned Parenthood Affiliates, told Vox their clinics have seen nearly four times the patient volume since June, with people seeking abortions from “the surrounding states and the entire Southeast.”
The 15-week ban was already challenged in state court, and the six-week ban will not take effect until after the Florida Supreme Court rules on the legality of the earlier ban. While abortion rights advocates believe they have a strong case, they know their odds are long thanks to a politicized judiciary. DeSantis has stacked the state’s high court with conservative appointees, transforming the bench from a 5-2 liberal majority to a 6-1 conservative one.
Still, advocates say it is imperative that the public understand that, no matter what, abortion care will remain legal up to 15 weeks in Florida, at least until that decision comes down later this summer.
“Having an effective date tied to a Supreme Court decision is really hard for the public to understand, and it is intentionally confusing,” said Filkowski.
Florida’s 15-week abortion ban is already being challenged in court
Anabely Lopes was 15 weeks into her pregnancy when her doctors informed her that her fetus had a fatal congenital disorder that would kill the baby shortly after birth. Lopes was devastated, and then soon alarmed when she could find no doctor who would even give her a medically exempt abortion, as the providers all feared being sued. At 16 weeks and three days pregnant, Lopes traveled 1,000 miles to Washington, DC, to end her pregnancy. She later joined Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) in February as her guest at the State of the Union, serving as an example of someone denied critical treatment under extreme abortion laws.
Abortion rights advocates have been challenging the 15-week ban as illegal under Florida’s constitution, but the law that barred Lopes from receiving the procedure has remained in effect as the litigation plays out. A decision is expected sometime this summer.
In the meantime, though, the state is trying to go further. If the bill takes effect, as experts think is likely given the aggressive political climate in the Republican-controlled state, it would instantly catapult Florida into the ranks of the most restrictive states in the country on abortion access.
The new law not only bans abortion after six weeks but also bans abortion by telemedicine, and requires any medication abortion to be dispensed in person, which effectively outlaws mail orders of the pills. (Researchers have affirmed there is no medical need for abortion pills to be administered in the physical presence of a health care provider.) No other state has had a six-week ban with a requirement for two in-person doctors visits and no option for telehealth.
While the Florida law included exceptions for rape and incest, it require anyone claiming those exceptions to provide a copy of a police report, medical record, or court order — even though victims often do not involve law enforcement. The executive director of the Florida Council Against Sexual Violence has called the exceptions “meaningless” and “harmful.”
Six weeks is simply not enough time for the vast majority of people to get abortion care, especially if remote options are off the table. As of 2017, nearly three-quarters of counties in Florida did not have any abortion clinics. In medical terms, pregnancy is measured from the date of the last menstrual period, not from the date of conception, and up to 25 percent of women don’t even have regular menstrual cycles, meaning a missed period wouldn’t signal anything unusual. It can take at least three weeks for a pregnancy hormone to appear on a home pregnancy test, and while blood tests can also confirm pregnancies, Florida health care professionals testified that it can take weeks to months to get an appointment with an OB-GYN, with wait times particularly long for low-income and Black Floridians.
Once a pregnancy is confirmed, a patient, under Florida law, would need to schedule an ultrasound with an abortion provider. Scheduling these appointments takes even more time. Filkowski told Vox wait times at their clinics average about 20 days.
These barriers would prove virtually insurmountable for most people, and even harder for minors in Florida, who are required by law to either get parental consent to end a pregnancy or petition a judge to bypass their parents.
The Republican state senator who sponsored the six-week ban, Erin Grall, conceded a teenager would be unlikely to go through that legal process within six weeks. “I think the purpose of this bill is to say that when there is life, we are going to protect it,” Grall said.
The law also includes $25 million in new state funding for anti-abortion pregnancy centers, which are typically religiously affiliated clinics that provide women with items like diapers and baby clothes, and counsel them against getting abortions. This represents a more than fivefold increase from the $4.45 million in taxpayer funds Florida already allocates to such centers.
Lacking enough votes to block the Senate bill, Democratic lawmakers tried and failed to amend it. Amendments included religious exemptions (two Jewish state senators argued Judaism encourages abortion to protect the health and safety of the mother, and other religions like Buddhism and Unitarianism allow abortions), an effort to eliminate the state’s 24-hour waiting period, and an exception for women facing mental health risk.
Florida provides critical reproductive health care for people throughout the South
While abortion banned after 15 weeks is far more restrictive than Floridians had to deal with prior to 2022, women in neighboring states like Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama have been contending with even stricter abortion rules since the overturn of Roe. As such, many have been traveling to Florida to end their pregnancies.
State data shows 82,192 people got abortions in Florida in 2022, compared to 79,817 in 2021. The increase was largely driven by those coming in from out of state. There were 6,708 non-Floridians who ended pregnancies in Florida in 2022, 38 percent more than the year prior.
If the ban goes into effect, people in the South will need to travel even farther for care, and many will likely turn to North Carolina, where it’s currently legal up to 21 weeks.
Stephanie Loraine Pineiro, who leads the reproductive justice group Florida Access Network, told Vox that if the ban takes effect, their work “will be focused on those needing to travel out of state, to wherever is safest and has the least amount of barriers.”
DeSantis is readying himself for the Republican presidential primary
The Republican governor is expected to announce his candidacy for the White House in the coming months, and no doubt expects signing a radically restrictive abortion law will help him in the competitive conservative primary. At least 13 GOP-controlled states have banned most abortions.
Among Florida voters, though, such restrictions are out of step with public opinion. One survey conducted by Florida Atlantic University last year found 67 percent of Floridians said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while just 12 percent supported a total ban. Another recent survey, led by the Public Religion Research Institute, found 64 percent of Floridians backed abortion in all or most cases.
Abortion rights advocates say they are not surprised to see the aggressive enthusiasm for restricting reproductive rights from DeSantis, even as he worked to avoid commenting on abortion much last year during his campaign.
“This is Ron DeSantis seeing the success other states have had in implementing six-week bans on abortion care, like Texas, Alabama, and Georgia,” said Pineiro. “I’m sure those served as fuel and inspiration for him to say, ‘Oh, it’s already been litigated.’”
Filkowski, of Florida Alliance of Planned Parenthood Affiliates, agreed. “Ron DeSantis has shown from day one a perpetual thirst to have control over our bodies, our lives, our libraries,” she said. “I think we have seen his political maneuvering to give the answer that suits the crowd that’s in front of him. Like, when he was asked about abortion during his campaign, he’d practically run and never gave a full answer. But we are not surprised now.”
Update, April 14, 7:00 am ET: This story was originally published on April 5 and has been updated to include details about the Florida House’s vote and DeSantis signing it.