During the 2021 Veto Session, advocates including Emily Werth and Hon. Susan Fox Gillis testified before the House Executive Committee on October 27, in support of HB 370, a measure to repeal the Parental Notice of Abortion Act.

Testimony of Emily Werth, Staff Attorney at the ACLU of IL

Thank you to the Chair and the members of the Committee for the opportunity to testify today.

My name is Emily Werth. I am a staff attorney at the ACLU of Illinois, working directly with the Judicial Bypass Coordination Project. Since the Parental Notice of Abortion Act first went into effect, this project has worked to ensure that young people who fear being harmed by involving their parents or other designated adult family members in their abortion decision have assistance with the burdensome legal process of judicial bypass. I have personally represented about 85 minors in judicial bypass hearings, and coordinated hundreds of referrals to volunteer attorneys.

Forced parental involvement laws hurt young people and serve no valid purpose. This conclusion comes from decades of social science research and the experience of the clients I have represented. That is why I urge this Committee to support the Youth Health and Safety Act, to repeal the Parental Notice of Abortion Act and instead identify more resources for pregnant and parenting youth.

Our project has represented more than 575 young people across the state forced to pursue a judicial bypass under the law, and in over 99.8% of cases the request for a waiver has been approved. Some argue this is a sign that the system is working, but that is a grave error. The system is complicated, and creates significant logistical and emotional burdens for young people. This number only reflects the young people who actually managed to get to court. 

There have been many who simply could not find a way to miss school to attend court during business hours without their parents being alerted. Other young people had families that were going through crises which prevented them from being able to get away for long enough to meet with a judge without raising suspicion. In other instances, a young person making arrangements for the court process was discovered by a parent, putting them in a dangerous situation. And then there were clients who were delayed for so long by the barriers to accessing the judicial bypass process that they were no longer within the legal window to obtain an abortion in Illinois. Human Rights Watch recently found this process has taken up to 47 days for some young people to complete. What haunts me are those youth who may have ended up parenting before they were ready because of this law.

No matter their individual circumstances, the judicial bypass process is always daunting for young people, and creates nothing more than fear and anxiety. It is no wonder. A complete stranger essentially holds the young person’s fate in their hands, and has control over the young person’s ability to make this consequential decision about their future and body. And the fear and anxiety of this process is compounded for youth of color who know how systemic discrimination in the legal system has impacted their communities, and who make up the majority of the young people who go through the bypass process. In my experience, the most emotionally challenging part of the bypass hearing for many young people – and the one most likely to make them tearful – is when they must describe for the judge the difficult or traumatic family circumstances that forced them to come to court for a judicial bypass in the first place.  And once the bypass hearing is finally concluded and a young person knows that the judicial bypass will be granted, the change in their demeanor, and their relief, is palpable every time.

This is the reality of the judicial bypass system. It is not simply filling out a form at the courthouse. 

This law forces youth into a fundamentally unjust choice between involving unsupportive or unavailable family members in their abortion decision, or trying to navigate an unfamiliar and intimidating court system. The bypass process is just a futile exercise – a barrier imposed for its own sake, which does nothing to help the young people who must endure it, and prevents some from ever obtaining the abortion care they are seeking.

The evidence and experience of the past eight years is clear: Parental Notice of Abortion threatens the health, safety and dignity of too many young people in Illinois. That is why I urge you to support the Youth Health and Safety Act and repeal this dangerous law. 

Thank you for your consideration, and I look forward to answering any questions you may have for me.

Testimony of Honorable Susan Fox Gillis, Retired Judge

Committee Chair and members,

My name is Susan Fox Gillis.  I retired three years ago as an Associate Judge in the County Division of the Circuit Court of Cook County. Over nearly two decades, I heard issues including adoptions, name changes and – over my last several years as a judge – judicial bypass hearings for young women seeking to have an abortion without notifying their parent, grandparent, step parent or legal guardian under the Parental Notice of Abortion Act of 1995. 

Hundreds of young women have come to the Circuit Court of Cook County since this law went into effect asking a judge like me to grant a waiver of parental notice. As judges in these matters, my colleagues and I tried to make the process as non-intimidating as we could – keeping the identity of the young woman anonymous, hearing these cases in our chambers instead of a court room, not wearing our robes to lessen their anxiety, and being as accommodating as possible to scheduling issues outside of the young person’s control.

But, make no mistake. No matter what a judge does, these hearings remain intimidating for young women as they come before us, a judge and a stranger, to answer intimate questions about their lives in order to be allowed to have this medical procedure that they have determined is best for them and their personal circumstances.

I am here today to urge this Committee to support this bill which would repeal the Parental Notice of Abortion Act.  That law – in my experience as a judge tasked with deciding on these waivers – is unnecessary, overly punitive and places burdens on young women seeking health care.

It should be repealed.  

Each of the young women who came before me had a good reason for not sharing her decision with a parent. The specifics of the reasons varied – a history of abuse and harm that would be repeated, an older sibling who had been forced to continue a pregnancy against her will, fear of being kicked out of her home based on past threats from her parent, an extraordinary circumstance like illness or issues of mental health in a family, or the absence of the parents from the young woman’s life. The young women who appeared in front of me saw sharing their story with me as their only option.

The young women I heard from showed a level of maturity and the competence to make this important decision. They truly were thinking about their lives and their future – and all the considerations about that future – in deciding that they were not yet prepared to become a parent. Every young woman who came in front of me met the level of maturity and was fully informed in order to meet the requirements of the law, and was thoughtful and thorough in considering all her options and reaching her decision. This law did not help them, it simply created an unnecessary hurdle for them.   Some decisions I made over the years as a judge could be difficult; the decisions to grant a bypass to these young women were not. 

As a Judge, I thought I understood the hurdles that young people overcame to get to my courtroom for the judicial bypass process, based on the stories I heard in court.  But I never really understood what these young women go through, and the implications of this law, until I represented a client in the bypass process myself.

After I retired from the bench I volunteered to represent one of these young women in her bypass hearing. Speaking and preparing for court with her was difficult.  Calls were a challenge to arrange and often cut off – even in mid-sentence or mid-discussion – as she tried to find a time when her parent was not around, a time when she would not be overheard and we could talk safely. She also struggled to figure out a way to get herself to the courthouse for her hearing; after her initial transportation plan fell through, she considered using her mother’s Uber account, until she realized that her mother would be able to see that she had taken a car to downtown Chicago if she did that.

This experience shed new light for me on the fact that young people have to go to extraordinary and unfair lengths just to get to court to obtain a judicial bypass. In addition, particularly in smaller counties or jurisdictions, the chance of the young woman being recognized in the courthouse is significant and presents a real challenge.

For these reasons, I am pleased to be here to support this bill which would repeal the Parental Notice of Abortion Act in Illinois.  And I look forward to answering your questions. 

Testimony of Heidi Dalenberg
Director of the Institutional Reform Project, ACLU of IL
Before the Senate Health Committee
Subject Matter Hearing re: DCFS’ care for LGBTQ youth
October 26, 2021

My name is Heidi Dalenberg, and I am the Director of the Institutional Reform Project of the ACLU of Illinois. 

Thank you Chairperson Morrison, Vice Chair Joyce, and Minority Spokesperson Syverson, for giving me the opportunity to speak with you today.

I am here in my capacity as one of the attorneys representing all children in the care of the Department and Family Services in the B.H. v. Smith case.  This Committee called this hearing to address the findings of the DCFS LGBTQ Youth in Care performance audit published earlier this year. 

Let me begin with the auditors’ finding that the Department currently is not able to accurately report on mistreatment of LGBTQI+ youth in care.  While we do not know exactly how widespread such mistreatment is, there is no question that it does occur for many youth.  In our individual contacts with these children we hear reports from transgender youth who should have been able to trust their caseworkers, but who were ignored, put off, and yelled at when they ask for transition-related healthcare.  These youth also frequently describe being deadnamed and misgendered by their caseworkers and caregivers.  And we regularly hear from LGBTQI+ youth in care that their caseworkers and direct care staff mock them, demean them, and stand idly by while these youth are bullied by their peers or their caregivers.  It is within that context that I’ll focus my brief comments today on two points – the implementation of Appendix K, which is the Department’s policy mandating affirming care for LGBTQI+ youth, and the Department’s plans for SOGIE data collection.

Perhaps the most significant finding from the audit was that DCFS has not timely or effectively implemented Appendix K.  That finding, with which we wholeheartedly agree, has been a source of extreme frustration and a tragedy for LGBTQI+ youth in care.  The policy itself says all of the right things, and sets appropriate high goals for caseworkers, foster parents, staff at residential facilities, and other caregivers.  The policy also states that all caregivers, and all direct service staff who interact with youth, must receive training about LGBTQI+ youth and what it means to create the affirming environment they need in order to thrive. 

In our view the two most important features required for effective implementation of Appendix K are training and accountability.  DCFS remains significantly deficient in both of these areas, but we want to acknowledge that we are now seeing some slow progress. 

• The Department has developed basic webinar training that covers basic LGBTQI+ terms and their meaning and introduces the concept of affirmation.  This training as we understand it is now required for foster parents and caseworkers, but we remain concerned that the Department still is not ensuring that all direct care staff at residential facilities and group homes are trained as Appendix K requires.
• The Department still does not have critically important advanced training for foster parents, caseworkers, and direct care staff.  This further training is essential to reinforce LGBTQI+ youths’ rights and ensure their well-being because it goes beyond a mere vocabulary lesson.  This is the level of training that must drive home youths’ absolute entitlement to be who they are without fear of disapproval, discipline, or maltreatment. To be effective, this training must be conducted live, in-person, by qualified trainers.  We understand that the Department is working with respected advocates to develop this variety of training, but we have yet to see or provide our input on those materials and have no way to estimate when delivery of this training can begin. 
• As for accountability, the Department still has not ensured that DCFS and private agency workers’ performance reviews regularly incorporate consideration of whether the worker is providing affirming care and taking action for youth when they learn that a youth is being mistreated because of who they are.  Without that regular oversight and appropriate corrective measures for workers who ignore or actively participate in mistreatment of LGBTQI+ youth these children will continue to suffer far worse outcomes than their peers.

The bottom line here is that LGBTQI+ youth in care will not receive the care they are entitled to just because caseworkers and foster parents have been required to sit through a basic vocabulary lesson and have been told to be affirming.  The steps the Department has taken so far are appropriate first steps, not solutions.

Let me turn now to the auditors’ finding that DCFS lacked reliable, consistent information regarding the youth in care identifying as LGBTQI+.  The audit found that DCFS had no process or procedure for speaking with youth about their identity or for recording information youth chose to share in a system that assured proper protection of youths’ privacy rights.  We deeply appreciate the measure that the Legislature passed earlier this year, which now requires DCFS and many of its sister agencies to begin systematic collection of Sexual Orientation Gender Identity Expression (SOGIE) data from the populations they serve.

We acknowledge that the Department is working to develop SOGIE data collection protocols.  We remain concerned, however that the Department has a very long way to go before its efforts will generate reasonably reliable data, and it is critically important that its data collection processes be framed in a manner that affirms youth and respects their right to control when, how, and to whom they disclose their information. 

The audit concluded that the Department should implement a formal process for gathering SOGIE data, but we caution that simply implementing formal questioning on an annual basis will not result in success.  Youth will not self-identify if they are not comfortable with the person asking for their information, and if they do not trust that their information will be kept entirely private if that is their preference.  The audit’s findings clearly demonstrate that LGBTQI+ youth in care generally do not have the necessary comfort level with their caseworkers or their caregivers.  As the audit of DCFS noted, DCFS was only able to identify approximately 90 youth in care who identified as LGBTQI+, while the auditors estimated that the correct number could be as high as 2,500.  The extraordinarily low rate of self-identification raises serious questions about who is best positioned to talk to youth about their SOGIE information and the context in which those conversations will occur.  And we also want to emphasize that SOGIE data collection is yet another area where it is essential that DCFS and the Department of Healthcare and Family Services work cooperatively together.  Nearly all DCFS youth receive Medicaid coverage, so they are served by both HFS and DCFS.  That should not result in barraging youth with duplicative and invasive questioning, duplicative data entry, or the increased risk of potential exposure of their data if it is stored in multiple data systems.

Our work with the Department regarding SOGIE data collection is still at a very preliminary stage, but we appreciate that the Department is involving us in this process and look forward to working with the Department on this very important issue.

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