The bill establishes the “fundamental right” of a woman to have an abortion and states that a “fertilized egg, embryo or fetus does not have independent rights.” It repeals the Illinois Abortion Law of 1975, doing away with provisions for spousal consent, waiting periods, criminal penalties for physicians who perform abortions and other restrictions on facilities where abortions are performed. A number of those provisions have not been enforced because of court injunctions.The Guttmacher Institute summarizes the main provisions of the legislation:
Illinois stands in contrast to neighboring states including Indiana, Kentucky and Missouri that have moved to enact restrictions on abortion availability in recent years.
- requires all public and private health insurance plans to cover abortion alongside other pregnancy-related services, to lower financial barriers to care;
- allows advanced practice nurses and physician assistants to provide abortions, to expand the pool of available providers;
- updates clinic regulations, which had been blocked in court and were not being enforced, to ensure abortion providers are not targeted with unnecessary and intentionally burdensome regulations;
- repeals outdated, unenforced laws that criminalize abortion, to ensure that no one who receives or provides abortion services is punished; and
- revises the state’s postviability abortion law so that it allows abortions later in pregnancy when medically necessary without a second physician’s approval, to ensure that a patient’s health needs guide medical decisions.
Permitting abortions by advanced practice nurses and physician assistants is an interesting (and depressing) innovation.
If this website is to believed, in 2019, no insurance plans offered to Illinois residents on the Obamacare insurance exchange included elective abortion coverage. This new state law requiring private health plans to offer abortion coverage presumably will force Obamacare exchange carriers to do so.
What other surgical procedures are nurses and PA's allowed to perform? Right now I can't think of any, unless you count stitching a cut or installing a PIC line. What could possibly go wrong?
ReplyDeleteMy urologist's lovely PA, whom I'll see tomorrow, isn't even allowed to take blood for my PSA. But that is by ukase of the insurance company, not the state or the medical society. She is very good at it, btw.
DeleteThe Illinois entry into the abortion sweepstakes looks to me to be as unconstitutional as Alabama's offering -- if SCOTUS has any interest in stare decisis. But, of course, Trump was elected to unsettle settled law, especially in the case of abortion. So the morning line is that Roe is about to be past history, which could make Illinois a destination state for suction tourism. (Which it actually was when Roe was decided.) Can't wait to see how gingerly the Chamber of Commerce handles it.
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