Illinois has been a champion for reproductive rights among states, passing a law in 2019 to declare abortion a “fundamental right” in the state, allowing minors to obtain an abortion without parental notification, and allowing state funds to pay for abortions for Medicaid enrollees. Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Democratic leaders in the General Assembly are preparing for a special session to do more to strengthen abortion rights.
That’s all in jeopardy, however, with two Illinois Supreme Court seats that are up for election this November. As of now, Democrats have a 4-3 majority on the court, but that could flip with these two seats. The two forced birther Republicans vying for those seats in suburban districts around Chicago could accomplish in Illinois what the movement accomplished on the Supreme Court.
That could have a huge ripple effect across the country. Illinois Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, telling the panel that the “number of out-of-state patients has doubled since Roe v. Wade was overturned.” Two new state Supreme Court justices could end up taking abortion access away from people in the entire Midwest.
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That would create further chaos and confusion or people trying to obtain abortions from forced birther states. Virtual clinics and online pharmacies are inundated, “telehealth abortion websites had more than a 25-fold increase in traffic, according to digital intelligence platform Similarweb.” Clinics bordering states where bans went in place after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to toss abortion rights are scrambling to meet the need. That includes providing medication abortion.
“We have people just going right over the border into New Mexico from Texas and parking there for their virtual visit and waiting for the medication to be mailed to them,” said Amy Hagstrom Miller, founder of Whole Women’s Health. Their clinics in Texas are shutting down, to be replaced by one in a New Mexico border city. That’s what Planned Parenthood has done with two clinics in the Boise, Idaho area, moving facilities just across the border to Ontario, Oregon.
“People’s main option is going to be either finding a way to travel out of state or being able to self manage,” Abigail Aiken, an associate professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin told Politico. “The discrepancy that we already lived with—in terms of access to abortion and in particular medication abortion being so zip code dependent—is really just getting more and more stark.”
Illinois’ Stratton told the Judiciary Committee that her state officials are calling on President Joe Biden to create “a centralized hub for providers and patients to ease the burden on facility capacity amid higher demand” and to provide “more access to federal money to support demand.”
That could be done. That’s something the Biden administration could get started on immediately—a declaration of an abortion public health crisis would give the federal government the power to do that. One of the things that a public health emergency would do is allow medical personnel to practice outside the states where they are licensed, giving providers the flexibility to provide abortion care—surgical or medication—across borders.
Christie Pitney, a midwife who works for Aid Access, told Politico that her organization has heard from more than 200 clinicians who want to help and provide care online. “I suspect that having seen two-plus years of telehealth abortions going well and research showing that it’s safe and effective has also helped,” she said. An emergency declaration could help pave the way to provide the legal protections providers need to do that.
Biden told reporters last weekend that he’s considering declaring the emergency, though White House staff have been trying to discourage that, apparently because they don’t want to offend anybody in the courts?
Which brings us back to Illinois and just how important state and local elections are in this fight. By all means, voting is going to be key to protecting what abortion rights are left in the states, and restoring them at the federal level. But so is actually taking on that fight now, not letting up. That emergency declaration would be a great place for Biden to start.
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