When the Supreme Court issued the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, no one could imagine that 45 years later the number of lives terminated in the United States would be 61 million. Some believed that marriages would be better, women would be happier. Has that happened?
Last Friday the Illinois legislature passed the Reproductive Health Act. I took the time to read through this bill. I am deeply saddened. Section 1-10 states that the life of a child that survived abortion needn’t be preserved. The wording is tortured because it is hard to describe the right to let a living child die.
Section 1-10 “Abortion” means the use of any instrument, medicine, drug, or any other substance or device to terminate the pregnancy of an individual known to be pregnant with intention other than to increase the probability of a live birth,to preserve the life or health of the child after live birth, or to remove a dead fetus.
When maternity care is described I wonder what the term, a patient’s legal proxy, means. Are the parents of a teenage girl informed?
“Maternity care” means health care provided in relation to pregnancy, labor and childbirth and the postpartum period, and includes prenatal care, care during labor and birthing, and postpartum care extending through one-year postpartum. Maternity care shall seek to optimize positive outcomes for the patient, and be provided on the basis of the physical and psychosocial needs of the patient. Not withstanding any of the above, all care shall be subject to the informed and voluntary consent of the patient, or the patients’s legal proxy, when the patient is unable to give consent.
Section 1-15
“Every individual has a fundamental right to make autonomous decisions about the individual’s own reproductive health, including the fundamental right to use or refuse reproductive health care.”
This section of the law describes the individual’s rights to make a decision about their health care. This is a precedent for parental rights. When medical procedures have risks and benefits, parents must have the right to consent or refuse for their child.
With all restrictions on abortion lifted, we must continue to educate young people on the facts of abortion, the risks and side effects to a woman. People of faith need to stand in support of a woman experiencing an unexpected pregnancy, especially if she is unmarried and without financial resources.
Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live. Deuteronomy 30:19b
Click here to read the full text of the Reproductive Health Act.
