By Mary Hallan FioRito
On the Friday afternoon before Christmas–as families prepared for the holiday–Gov. J.B. Pritzker gave Illinois parents a terrible present. It was not wrapped, but he put his name on it:.
Pritzker signed the bill repealing the Illinois Parental Notification of Abortion Act, a commonsense law requiring abortion providers to notify parents or guardian that an abortion would be performed on minor girls.
It was active since 2013, intended in part to thwart the human sexual trafficing of young girls, many who were pulled into the sex trade and had lost contact with their parents.
And Pritzker killed it for Christmas with the help of his Democratic House and State Senate majorities.
The law that Pritzker killed had nothing to do with parental consent. All it did was mandate that parents or guardians be notified–by the abortion provider–-before an abortion would be performed.
Dr. Brook Bello, an advocate for victims of sex trafficking–and who was herself raped as a child and trafficked as a teenager and lost contact with her parents during that gruesome experience–had something to say. :
“I can only imagine what my father or mother would have done if they at least received notification that I was having an abortion at 15 that they did not know about. They assumed I ran away and stayed away on my own free will. It only makes the work we do to lessen and prevent human trafficking that much harder,” Dr Bello said.
There is a remarkable degree of consensus about parental notice of abortion. A Tarrance Group poll of Illinois residents found that 72% of Illinois voters wanted to see the law remain in place — that statistic includes 55% of respondents to the same poll who identified as “pro-choice or strongly pro-choice.”
Governor Pritzker’s statement on his signing the repeal was deliberately misleading, implying that the law required a minor girl who was a victim of abuse or neglect to notify a parent or guardian. It did not.
Read more from johnkassnews.com here.
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