{"id":18455,"date":"2023-07-17T21:18:16","date_gmt":"2023-07-18T03:18:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=18455"},"modified":"2023-07-17T21:24:28","modified_gmt":"2023-07-18T03:24:28","slug":"whats-a-pro-life-illinoisan-to-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2023\/07\/whats-a-pro-life-illinoisan-to-do.html","title":{"rendered":"What’s A Pro-Life Illinoisan To do?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

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The Illinois Republican Party is struggling \u2014 maybe not in the same way as in Arizona or Michigan, but in 2022, due to gerrymandering and due to the consequences of a far-right candidate for governor, the Democrats widened their supermajority control of the state legislature even further.\u00a0 Now there are various groups \u2014 grass roots groups, statewide party groups, and local township Republican party groups, trying to regroup, to re-brand, and somehow get the pro- and anti-Trump factions to work together, while seeking to persuade independents that their interests really align with the Republican Party on a local level regardless of who end up being the parties\u2019 2024 presidential nominees.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s all well and good, but as far as I can tell, \u201cestablishment\u201d Republicans are trying to weasel their way out of taking a position on abortion, as a party.\u00a0 It\u2019s become a third rail.\u00a0 Even locally, my state house Republican candidate, in the local debate, got very squirrely about the issue.\u00a0 So what I want to do in this little blog post is put on my candidate\u2019s hat, and ask myself, if I were a candidate called on to explain my position, what would I say?<\/p>\n

To start with, here\u2019s a brief summary of abortion law in Illinois<\/a>:\u00a0 up until viability, there are no restrictions at all, and after that, there is a nominal requirement that the mother\u2019s health be at risk, but to my understanding there are no documentation requirements; this restriction merely exists on paper.\u00a0 In addition, Medicaid and commercial insurance are required by state law to cover abortion and must also provide abortion pills without any out-of-pocket cost<\/a>.\u00a0 After Roe v. Wade was overturned and the state began to see an increasing number of abortions from out-of-state women, Gov. Pritzker increased the Medicaid reimbursement rates significantly.\u00a0 Most recently, the legislature passed a bill<\/a> which would ban \u201cdeceptive practices\u201d by crisis pregnancy centers \u2014 a bill which Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul claimed was necessary because, supposedly, those centers \u201ctrick\u201d women into thinking they provide abortions; in reality, the text of the bill<\/a> is so expansive that the state could deem a crisis pregnancy center to be in violation if they fail in any way to conform to the \u201cparty line\u201d that abortion is a good thing.\u00a0 Oh, and let\u2019s not forget that Illinois law defines \u201cviability\u201d<\/a> in such a way as to extend the period of \u201cpre-viability\u201d longer than you\u2019d expect:\u00a0 \u201c\u2018Fetal viability\u2019 means that, in the professional judgment of the attending health care professional, based on the particular facts of the case, there is a significant likelihood of a fetus\u2019 sustained survival outside the uterus without the application of extraordinary medical measures.\u201d\u00a0 In other words, depending on the definition of \u201cextraordinary,\u201d even a moderately-premature gestational age could be deemed \u201cnon-viable.\u201d\u00a0 All of this adds up to a very strong abortion advocacy by the state government, yet the fact that there is still on paper a prohibition of post-viability abortions provides a veneer of deniability which Democrats are happy to use (as I\u2019m told was the case in a local town hall sponsored by my own state senator and representative).<\/p>\n

So one presumes that the majority of Illinoisans would see this as extreme, would acknowledge that it is wrong, inhumane, to kill very developed babies-in-the-womb, even if those same folks are likely to believe earlier abortion is just fine.\u00a0 Yet so far as I can tell, there are likewise large numbers of people who consider this an acceptable trade-off; that is, if they believe the options are black-and-white, and you must either support the expansive abortion laws as they currently exist or you must support a total ban, then some number of deaths of unborn babies, even if they acknowledge they are fully-human, are acceptable to ensure women have access to early abortion.\u00a0 (Incidentally, the line that\u2019s repeated that \u201cno woman ever gets a later abortion unless there is a dire need\u201d is just not true, though I\u2019ve already gotten side tracked enough to not now dig up data on that.)<\/p>\n

Which means I\u2019ve finally written out the context for my imaginary speech and it goes something like this:<\/p>\n

First of all, I am pro-life.\u00a0 I believe that unborn lives are human lives and have a right to live just as everyone else does.\u00a0 I believe that it is part of being human that there are limits to the idea of \u201cbodily autonomy,\u201d that we all have obligations and cannot harm others to escape those obligations.<\/p>\n

At the same time, I am not convinced that the hardline approach taken by some states in their abortion bans is wise or prudent.\u00a0 In some cases, the wording of the legislation has been unclear; to my understanding, the intent of the legislature has been to provide accommodation for certain \u201chard cases\u201d and it\u2019s not clear to me whether the reporting on these states is accurate but there are reasonable concerns.\u00a0 Beyond that, I worry about a situation of \u201cretaliatory lawmaking\u201d \u2014 in Illinois, of course, the first aggressively pro-abortion laws appeared in 2018 and 2019, but in the past year we have seen actions to make abortion even more widely accessible in response to other states\u2019 restrictions.\u00a0 And beyond that, in Michigan the response to the existing abortion restriction wasn\u2019t a compromise but an all-out campaign by pro-abortion activists, with a large national funding base, to enshrine abortion in the state constitution<\/a>, with the same toothless post-viability protection (that is, protection of \u201cmental health\u201d is explicitly a valid reason for an abortion at any gestational age) as in Illinois.\u00a0 Could this have been avoided with a compromise bill?\u00a0 I don\u2019t know, but it worries me that other states could see the same outcome \u2014 that by making a drastic change without supermajority support, those states risk losing the protections that they have enacted and a long-term outcome that\u2019s worse.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also clear to me that states which enact abortion restrictions simply must pair this with substantial increases in social spending for families.\u00a0 That\u2019s not easy, because there is a point at which \u201cgenerous social spending\u201d becomes \u201ccreating welfare queens,\u201d creating circumstances in which good intentions actually cause harm \u2014 welfare cliffs which mean people are better off not working, or pay high marginal \u2018tax\u2019 rates for losing a lot of benefit for only a little pay raise, or marriage penalties in how welfare benefits are calculated that deter people from marrying, for example.\u00a0 And the national debt is a huge roadblock and states\u2019 needs to balance their budgets are another one, and\u00a0 I don\u2019t really have a lot of answers here because, again, this is tough to figure out, but it\u2019s still important.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s a really awful imaginary speech, but after all, it\u2019s only hypothetical.\u00a0 To boil it down to bullet points, a prolife candidate in a pro-abortion state must:<\/p>\n