Illinois Senate Passes Bill to Protect the ‘Fundamental Right’ to Access Abortion

While lawmakers in several states are attempting to strip
women and other marginalized genders of their reproductive health rights with draconian
anti-abortion legislation, Illinois is stepping up with a strong bill to
protect the “fundamental right” to have an abortion.

On Friday, the Illinois Senate voted
34-20 in favor of the Reproductive Health Act, which states that a
“fertilized egg, embryo or fetus does not have independent rights,” the Chicago Tribune reported. The
legislation passed the state House earlier this week and now heads to Gov. J.B.
Pritzker, who has promised to sign it into law.

Democratic Sen. Melinda Bush, the chief sponsor of the bill
in the state Senate, told the Tribune
that the legislation is needed because “there’s a war against women’s rights
going on.” She said the Reproductive Health Act considers abortion the same as
“every other medical procedure.”

It also repeals part of the state’s abortion law dating to
the 1970s that called for criminal penalties for doctors and required spousal
consent, among other rules. Those regulations previously had been blocked by
courts. Additionally, the new legislation creates pregnancy
benefits, access to contraception, and other healthcare measures, according
to the Daily Herald.

Bush said the bill is needed because there is “a very real
possibility that Roe v. Wade will be overturned in the next few years.” She
said it “guarantees that women in Illinois have the right to make decisions
about their bodies, regardless of what happens at the federal level,” the Herald reported.

In a statement, Pritzker, a billionaire Democrat elected governor
last November, vowed that Illinois would become “the most progressive in the
nation for reproductive healthcare.”

“In Illinois, we trust women to make the most personal and
fundamental decisions of their lives — and now, that will be the law of the
land, even as it’s under threat in other states,” Pritzker said, according to
the Tribune.

At least six Republican-controlled states recently have
sought to restrict and criminalize abortion in a sweeping effort to force the
issue to the U.S. Supreme Court. The latest
state to pass a restrictive abortion bill was Louisiana, where Democratic
Gov. John Bel Edwards signed an anti-abortion law on Thursday. That law would ban
abortion when an ultrasound can detect a “fetal heartbeat,” about six weeks
into pregnancy.

In Missouri, a judge on Friday blocked an attempt by the
health department to close
the state’s only abortion provider. If the St. Louis Planned Parenthood
chapter’s license is successfully revoked, as state officials are attempting to
do, Missouri would become the first state without a clinic providing abortions
in 46 years, NPR reported. A hearing on the issue is scheduled for Tuesday.