September was just six hours old when four people already had been murdered in Chicago. The month’s last weekend was marred by two homicides and another 17 people — including a six-month-old boy — being shot and injured.
But no, curbing the violence plaguing Chicago was not the focus of a bill introduced last week in the Illinois state legislature by Chicago-area state Rep. Daniel Didech. Instead, Didech’s bill seeks to prevent Illinois state employees from having to travel on business to states that regulate abortion. And if they do dare to cross those state lines, the bill seeks to prevent them from being reimbursed for that travel.
“I have the responsibility to protect our state employees,” Didech said while introducing his bill.
State employees sometimes have to travel for conferences or training, and Didech apparently doesn’t want them to wind up in a state, such as Georgia or Missouri, that takes the sanctity of life seriously. Particularly not after Illinois Gov. Jay Pritzker signed a sweeping pro-abortion law in June that removed protections for the unborn. Pritzker called his state “a beacon of hope in the heart of this nation.” It’s clear that the abortion distortion in the state starts from the top and trickles down.
Didech’s bill suggests that pregnant women would be in danger if they leave the state. For instance, he said when announcing his harebrained scheme that pregnant women who suffer a miscarriage away from home might find themselves being investigated to determine the cause of the miscarriage.
Which, of course, is nonsense.
In a New York Times story from May that ran under the sub-headline: “The possible problems of a new Georgia law,” a law professor speculated that a woman found liable for causing her own miscarriage could be charged with second-degree murder. Of course, the law does not actually say miscarriages will be investigated, but the Times found it worth including in the draconian “possible problems” the law might create.
This is the kind of hysteria that erupts in the pro-abortion community whenever a state exercises what even Roe vs. Wade itself acknowledged as a legitimate state interest: the protection of life in the womb.
After Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed the law protecting babies from abortion once a heartbeat can be detected, abortion activist and actress Alyssa Milano suggested a nationwide “sex strike.” When that failed to take off, a campaign took shape to prod film companies to give up the significant financial benefits they get from shooting movies and television shows in Georgia by boycotting the state.
That ill-fated plan kind of fell off the radar, until this past weekend, when director Tyler Perry, who has a film company in Atlanta, said he would not participate in the boycott. Didech’s proposal is more of the same kind of lunacy that garners headlines but — thankfully — accomplishes nothing.
A quick look at Didech’s Twitter feed shows him wearing Planned Parenthood pink and thanking the nation’s largest abortion profiteer for helping him protect abortion rights. This was after Gov. Pritzker had already declared Illinois the most “progressive” state in the union when it comes to killing the unborn.
How much more protection does abortion need?
Didech’s bill is another clear sign that the Democrats — once the party that said abortion should be “safe, legal and rare” — will likely no longer be satisfied until the right to life has been deleted from the Declaration of Independence itself.
Father Frank Pavone is the National Director of Priests for Life.
