News & Commentary

Some members of the Illinois General Assembly once again are playing politics with women’s health -- and threatening our access to contraception and abortion! For the second year in a row, anti-contraception/anti-abortion legislators sent restrictive reproductive health bills to the House Agriculture and Conservation Committee. I grew up in North Dakota – an agricultural state if there ever was one – and, based on what I saw in the House Ag Committee this past Tuesday, it is time to muck out the barn by publicizing the inappropriateness of sending women’s health bills to a Committee that simultaneously insisted on its expertise in women’s health issues and then failed to ask a single question of the doctor who appeared to oppose two bills that pose a serious threat to women’s health.

In recent weeks and months we have seen several painful examples of the way in which politics is used to threaten and damage women’s health care – the Komen/Planned Parenthood funding issue, the issue of contraceptive coverage in employee health care benefit plans, the personhood amendments in states across the nation and severe restrictions on reproductive healthcare in several states. Now the campaign against women’s health care has come back to Illinois. We are currently facing two bills that seek to close down access to reproductive health care under the guise of protecting women’s health– by ramming measures through, of all places, the Agriculture Committee.

The ACLU of Illinois' Executive Director Colleen Connell was on WTTW's Chicago Tonight discussing the recent compromise by the Obama administration to ensure that employees of religiously affiliated institutions get contraceptive coverage at no additional cost to them, without requiring religiously-affiliated non-profit employers to pay for the cost of the contraceptive coverage.  The ACLU of Illinois has been holding panel discussions about the contraception issue throughout Illinois, entitled "The War on Contraception" as part of our Defending the Targets of Intolerance campaign.

Melissa was pregnant at the time of her arrest in 2006; she gave birth in shackles. Melissa was in shackles two days prior to giving birth to her son. As she delivered her baby, her wrists were handcuffed to the bed, a leg iron chained her to the stirrups, and a male sheriff deputy sat in the room, watching TV, as Melissa wailed in pain. This is just one of many stories of incarcerated women in Illinois who have suffered the harm and indignity of giving birth in chains.

Duri