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Illinois expands abortion rights amid stringent bans across the US

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mystery-ak:
Illinois expands abortion rights amid stringent bans across the US
by Cassidy Morrison
 | June 01, 2019 12:55 PM



The Illinois State Senate passed sweeping abortion protections late Friday, which will most likely be signed by Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat. The Senate voted 34-20 for the bill to remove restrictions on certain late-term abortions and criminal penalties on physicians who perform the procedures.

The Reproductive Health Act, introduced by Democratic Rep. Kelly Cassidy, passed in the House on Tuesday by a 64-50 vote with six Democrats voting against it. It establishes a "fundamental right" for a woman to get an abortion.

Following the passage of the bill in the House Tuesday, Pritzker said, "Illinois is making history, because our state will now be 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."

The bill is a rebuke of recent stringent abortion restrictions passed in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Missouri.

“To our neighbors in Illinois who hear the news around the country and worry that this war on women is coming to Illinois, I say, not on my watch,” Cassidy said in Tuesday’s House chamber debates. “To the people in Missouri and Alabama and Georgia and Kentucky and Mississippi and Ohio, I say, not on my watch.”

In Illinois, abortion is still legal when the fetus is viable outside the womb, and Cassidy’s bill provides some of the most expansive abortion rights measures in the country.

“This bill means that for a woman at my stage in pregnancy, where the baby responds to his dad’s voice as he reads him books at night ... but if that woman says, ‘Based on my familial health, this is medically necessary,’ that is allowed,” Republican Rep. Avery Bourne, an expectant mother at 34 weeks, said Tuesday.

The Illinois vote comes on the heels of several abortion bans, including the most restrictive all-out ban signed into law in Alabama, the six-week ban passed in the Louisiana State House, and a possible closure of Missouri’s last abortion clinic.

Cassidy said her medically necessary abortion two decades ago both saved her life and allowed her to have three children without complications.

“As attacks escalate around us, Illinois can respond with equal force to defend reproductive freedom,” Cassidy said.


https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/illinois-expands-abortion-rights-amid-stringent-bans-across-the-u-s

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