UPDATE: Legislation filed Wednesday.See below the fold.
SPRINGFIELD – Requiring parents to be notified before their minor daughter can undergo an abortion and protecting 20 plus week preborn babies from having their lives ended by partial birth abortions are two "really bad stuff" laws abortion supporters are pushing to repeal in Illinois.
“House Bill 40 was a very courageous and important first step, and now we’re actually moving down the path of making the vision and the values of House Bill 40 a reality,” ACLU Illinois Executive Director Colleen Connell told reporters Tuesday. “We’re getting rid of all the really bad stuff.”
The ACLU and Planned Parenthood are flexing their powerful muscles in a sympathetic Democrat-controlled Illinois General Assembly with a governor that fully supports their efforts to roll back even the weakest restrictions on abortion in Illinois. Abortion supporters are emboldened and jumping on the timing.
“The time is unquestionably now. Both because of what’s happening nationwide with President Trump and his two successful nominations to the Supreme Court, as well as what’s happening in some of the surrounding states in which abortion and birth control continue to be singled out for really punitive treatment and continued marginalization of women’s health care. And that marginalization of women’s health care is wrong and dangerous,” Connell said.
The announcement stirred quick and strong reaction from the state's pro-life community.
"Illinois is already the abortion capital of the Midwest. But that’s not enough for Governor Pritzker: he want’s to make Illinois the abortion capital of the United States," Eric Scheidler of the Pro Life Action League said. "Illinois parents will be shocked to learn that Pritzker, acting on behalf of Planned Parenthood, wants to keep them from knowing if their 13-year-old daughters get abortions."
"Illinois families will be horrified to contemplate the barbaric practice of partial birth abortion—that Governor Pritzker wants to legalize in our state—in which a partially delivered child’s brains are suctioned out of its skull to collapse it and complete the procedure," Scheidler said. "Illinois taxpayers and businesses, already required to pay for public aid abortions, would be forced into even further personal involvement with abortion through their private insurance plans."
Illinois voters are not going to stand for this kind of sweeping expansion of abortion in Illinois, he said. "We will defeat these bills, which are so offensive to the values of Illinois families"
With few pro-life Democrats in the Democrat-controlled Illinois General Assembly, defeating the abortion measures will be very difficult.
UPDATE:
