The Illinois state senate, dominated by Democratic lawmakers, is prepared to pass the radical Reproductive Health Act (RHA), establishing abortion as a “fundamental right” and rolling back state-level restrictions on the procedure. On Tuesday, the bill passed the Illinois house on a 64–50 vote.
The RHA repeals the state’s ban on medically unnecessary partial-birth-abortion procedures (which also are banned under federal law) and mandates that all health-insurance companies cover abortion procedures, at any stage of pregnancy and for any reason. It also repeals the state’s Abortion Performance Refusal Act, which protects doctors and hospitals with moral objections to performing or participating in abortions. The RHA offers no religious or conscience-based exemptions for any such individuals or institutions.
Perhaps most disturbing of all, the RHA goes so far as to explicitly dehumanize unborn human beings in the quest to equate the right to kill the unborn with the right to make personal health-care choices, asserting that “a fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus does not have independent rights under the laws of this State.” This language, more than anything else in the legislation, exposes the depraved final goal of the abortion-rights movement.
It is not enough to use the law to enforce a twisted notion of justice that privileges a woman’s right to bodily autonomy over the right to life of the human being inside her. That vulnerable human being also must be explicitly stripped of his or her claim to any legal recognition whatsoever. Such a policy is necessary to sustain the argument for abortion: An unborn human being has value and rights in the eyes of the state only inasmuch as he or she is wanted by his or her mother.
Democratic governor J. B. Pritzker said in a statement after the bill passed the House on Tuesday that he will sign the legislation. “With reproductive healthcare under attack across the country, we must do everything in our power to protect women’s rights in Illinois,” Pritzker said. “Today was a major step forward for every woman in this state and I look forward continuing my work as an ally by signing the Reproductive Healthcare Act into law.”
Pritzker ignores, as abortion-minded Democrats nearly always do, that not all women support unlimited access to abortion, and, in fact, that women tend to be more pro-life than men. To the progressive mind, abortion is the linchpin to female fulfillment, and expanding access to it therefore must be presented as a victory for all women — including those who stubbornly oppose it, apparently not knowing what’s in our own best interest.
This effort in Illinois to expand abortion rights past the confines even of Roe and Casey is part of a broader campaign underway in blue states to ensure that women will continue to be able to abort healthy fetuses at any point in pregnancy, including after viability, even if the Supreme Court loosens or rolls back the decades of jurisprudence that bolster our current federal regime of abortion on demand.