Roe V. Wade Court Decision: What It Means For Women Across Illinois

ILLINOIS — With abortion no longer a constitutional right for women across the country after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on Friday, more than a month after a leaked opinion of the ruling was published, women in many states face either more prohibitive laws or a complete ban on the procedure to terminate a pregnancy.

Regardless of Friday's decision from the Supreme Court, Illinois will remain one of at least 13 states across the U.S. where abortion will remain legal after the ruling became official. After the leaked Supreme Court ruling was published by Politico in early May, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and other state lawmakers made it clear that Illinois will remain a safe harbor for women who want to have an abortion going forward.

Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito wrote the opinion for a 6-3 majority, which overturned the 1973 decision that had made abortion a constitutional right for women across the country for decades.

"In Illinois, we trust women," Pritzker said in a statement on Friday. "Despite the action of the Supreme Court today overturning Roe v. Wade, the right to safe, accessible reproductive health care is in full force in Illinois – and will remain so.

He added: "In Illinois, we've planned for this terrible day, an enormous step backward and a shattering loss of rights."

Other Illinois lawmakers agreed.

"By striking down Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court has turned back the clock on women’s rights by denying them autonomy over their own bodies. This decision currently hurts poor, rural, and disadvantaged women in conservative states the most, but it has the potential to affect every woman in this country as it opens the door for a future GOP-controlled Congress to pass a national ban,” said U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush said in a statement issued on Friday. “If the conservative pro-life movement really cared about the lives of children, they would be supporting mothers and children instead of prohibiting healthcare access and oppressing women.”

Pritzker said in early May that Illinois will remain a safe harbor for women “no matter what atrocity of an opinion the Supreme Court officially rolls out this summer in regard to Roe versus Wade.”

“Abortion will always be safe and legal here in Illinois,” Pritzker said after the leak of the opinion was made public on May 3.

Pritzker signed the Reproductive Health Care Act into law in 2019. The law establishes a fundamental right to reproductive healthcare —including abortion and maternity care — in Illinois state law. The law also ensures that state regulations reflect current medical standards and require Illinois' private health insurance plans to cover abortion like they do other pregnancy-related care.

In May, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito Jr.’s majority opinion draft was leaked to Politico, setting the stage for a seismic shift in abortion rights.

At least 26 states are certain or likely to make it nearly impossible for a woman to get a procedure that was completely legal for her mother, grandmother, or even great-grandmother, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion rights research and policy group.

With the decision, abortion would be illegal or a nearly impossible procedure to get in about half of U.S. states, including large swaths of the South, Midwest, and Northern Plains.

Abortion is already illegal or soon will be in 13 states with pre-existing “trigger” laws banning abortion set to take effect with the dismantling of Roe and Casey, and another four are poised to ban it, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Nine have so-called fetal heartbeat laws that make the procedure illegal before many women know they are pregnant.

Abortion rights were long considered settled law; and even as conservative states pushed at-the-time unconstitutional fetal heartbeat laws and others restricting abortion access to bring the court to this moment, many legal scholars doubted a right that generations of women and men had counted on was in serious jeopardy.

The case that made it to a full hearing before the court, Mississippi’s 15-week ban on abortion, came after former President Donald Trump appointed three conservative judges — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and, a few months before his term ended, Amy Coney Barrett, who replaced liberal stalwart Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died in September 2020.

The court heard oral arguments on the Mississippi case in December.

Lawyers for the state of Mississippi had proposed an array of mechanisms to uphold the 15-week abortion ban but said the court ultimately should overturn the "egregiously wrong" Roe and Casey rulings.

If the court "does not impose a substantial obstacle to 'a significant number of women' seeking abortions," the state argued at the time, the justices should reinterpret the "undue burden" standard established in Roe and give the state the authority to "prohibit elective abortions before viability" of the fetus.

Since the Supreme Court opinion was leaked in May, several large protests have taken place in Chicago as women have come together to speak out about the government having a say in their reproductive rights.

On June 1, the measure that repeals parental notification of abortion went into effect after Pritzker signed the repeal in December. The 1995 parental notification law didn’t go into effect until 2013 after it was tied up for years in litigation. Now, doctors in Illinois may perform abortions on minors without notifying their parents.

At a campaign stop last week, Pritzker repeated his pledge that Illinois will always be a place where abortion is legal, even for girls who do not notify their parents that they had the procedure performed.

Meanwhile, all six Republican gubernatorial candidates have pledged to restore parental notification. Pritzker has said that each of his potential opponents in the November general election wants to make Illinois an anti-choice state.

In 2020, 9,600 women came to Illinois from out of state to have an abortion performed, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health. Of those women, 1,180 were under the age of 18 while 88 were under the age of 15.