A nearly $200,000 fine is threatening to shut down a Florida abortion clinic. But activists have already crowdfunded half of it.
Courtesy of SWAN of Orlando.
- A $193,000 fine against the Center of Orlando for Women is threatening to bankrupt the abortion clinic.
- The state wants to "fine our clinic out of existence," a local volunteer told Insider.
- The organization Stand With Abortion Now has already crowdfunded nearly half the fine.
When a six-figure fine threatened a Florida abortion clinic, its volunteers didn't hesitate.
In just a few days, Stand With Abortion Now of Orlando, a local advocacy group launched after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade known, has already raised nearly half the $193,000 fine that the state levied against the Center of Orlando for Women, one of just two abortion clinics in the city.
"Florida's AHCA, the Agency for Healthcare Administration, has levied some pretty outrageous fines against our clinic, basically in an attempt for the state to fine our clinic out of existence," one of the group's volunteers, who asked that their name not be used for safety reasons, told Insider.
The volunteers typically help shield patients entering the abortion clinic from anti-abortion activists. They often rely on aliases, wear sunglasses, and use oversized umbrellas to protect their own identities in the contentious line of work.
Florida lawmakers passed a 6-week abortion ban in April, outlawing abortion before most women even know they are pregnant. The law won't officially go into effect unless the state's previous 15-week ban is upheld in court.
The exorbitant fine stems from a 24-hour waiting period law that requires a patient to have two appointments 24 hours apart in order to obtain an abortion. That law was contested in court for years until a judge finally approved it in April 2022. The state says the Center of Orlando for Women violated the waiting period in 193 instances after the law's approval, though the abortion clinic argues that it made several good-faith efforts to ascertain when the law would go into effect, according to the Orlando Weekly.
"The clinic tried to reach out to the state multiple times to see when exactly that law was going into effect because it was made very unclear, and that's done pretty intentionally," the volunteer told Insider.
Though Florida's Agency for Healthcare Administration has discretion over the fine amount in each case, they opted to apply the $1,000 maximum to each alleged violation, resulting in the $193,000 fine, the Orlando Weekly reported. An attorney for the clinic wrote in one filing that the fine would "likely force the clinic into bankruptcy or closure," the outlet reported.
The newly-launched fundraiser to help pay the fine and save the clinic has seen donations flood in quicker than expected. Donations from $1 to thousands of dollars have come in from people who want to save "this independent abortion clinic in the south," the volunteer said.
"I was expecting it to be definitely a slower crawl than it has been," they told Insider. "The greatest catapult in this so far has been those little donations, because they mean so much because even people that can't give a lot, they want to be a part of this thing together."