A bill introduced in Illinois this week by Democratic State Rep. Daniel Didech would limit the travel of government employees in an official capacity to states that have passed legislation that restricts abortions.
The bill would block the Illinois state government from requiring government staff to travel to states that have certain forms of abortion restriction or policies that require investigation of some pregnancy losses. Illinois’ neighboring states Indiana, Missouri, and Kentucky all passed new laws in 2019 to protect unborn children as well as nine other states.
Didech’s proposed law specifically cited states that have passed “heartbeat bills” that work to eliminate abortions after eight weeks of pregnancy, or when a heartbeat is detected in the unborn baby. The proposal would also ban trips to states that do not provide exemptions to their abortion bans for cases of pregnancy by rape and incest.
“What these other states are doing is, to me, very dangerous,” Didech said of his legislative proposal. “To a large extent, yes, abortion is a big part of it, but it’s not entirely about abortion.”
Didech also cited the limits on abortion access as potentially dangerous to traveling government employees. “As a member of the Legislature, I have the responsibility to protect our state employees,” he said of the measure.
The Buffalo Grove representative also dismissed the idea that his proposed law was a boycott of the states in question, but recognized how his suggestion could be interpreted that way. “This is not like a boycott of those states or anything like that, although in effect, it may look similar,” he said. “The purpose of the bill is to protect women who may not be able to get the health care they may need when they’re traveling on official state business.”
Robert Gilligan, executive director of the Illinois Catholic Conference, found the bill to be lacking in logic in terms of effective state legislation. “I mean it is absurd… do we prevent state employees from traveling to Flint, Michigan where they have less safe water? This type of thinking is endless,” Gilligan said. “I think we should have a list of all states with weaker air pollution laws, water laws, driving laws, gun laws, and we shouldn’t be sending people to those areas either.”
The proposed law does provide some extensions for travel to the states with abortion bans if the government of Illinois should deem them truly necessary.
