On October 30, Donald Trump made an announcement: “I’m going to protect the women, whether they like it or not,” he said, promising to deny the agency of half the American population.
The MAGA throng he was addressing in Wisconsin cheered.
I’m trying to imagine Trump announcing that he’s going to protect American men, “whether they like it or not.” Would this naked threat inspire any reaction other than jeering, even among the MAGA crowd? Especially among the MAGA crowd?
Maybe laughter.
Less than a week later, the puffed-up pussy grabber was elected to the presidency. Again.
Last month, a coalition of groups that also want to dominate the female half of the American populace filed a federal lawsuit seeking to take away the mandatory insurance coverage for abortion that Illinois established in 2019.
That’s when state legislators passed the Illinois Reproductive Health Act, recognizing abortion as a “fundamental right.”
The Reproductive Health Act stipulates that state-regulated insurance policies that provide pregnancy care must also cover pregnancy termination, both pharmaceutical and surgical.
There’s nothing in the Reproductive Health Act that would force the individual plaintiffs in this case, or anyone else, to have an abortion. Theirs is a more subtle complaint: they may never have to personally experience an unwanted pregnancy and childbirth (most of them are men), but they are all suffering pangs of conscience.
By paying premiums into a pool of funds that are used to cover a wide range of medical care, including abortions, the plaintiffs say they’ve been made to feel complicit in what their religion regards as an act of murder. They want the state to stop the mandatory coverage and instead require that every insurer regulated by the state offers the option of policies that do not include abortion coverage.
The defendants are Governor J.B. Pritzker, Attorney General Kwame Raoul, and the acting director of the Illinois Department of Insurance, Ann Gillespie.
Plaintiffs include Students for Life of America, a Virginia-based national organization committed to the total elimination of abortion. Students for Life says it has standing in this case because some of its employees live in Illinois, and because six of its members are students at Illinois colleges, and Illinois law “makes it impossible” for them to purchase “state-regulated health insurance that excludes abortion coverage.” All six of these conscience-stricken Students for Life members are male.
Plaintiffs also include the Pro-Life Action League and its president, Ann Scheidler. The Pro-Life Action League, based in Aurora, was founded in 1980 by Scheidler’s late husband, Joseph Scheidler, and the organization’s current president is her son, Eric Scheidler, also a plaintiff in this case. Joseph Scheidler is celebrated as the pioneer of confrontational “sidewalk counseling” tactics, intercepting women as they try to enter abortion clinics.
Illinois Right to Life and its executive director are also listed as plaintiffs, along with a church, a school, and a DuPage County business.
The lawsuit was filed by the Thomas More Society, a Chicago antiabortion law firm founded in 1998 by Thomas Brejcha, who defended Joseph Scheidler through years of legal battles with the National Organization for Women. (Ann Scheidler is the chairman of the Thomas More Society board.) The lawsuit claims that Illinois is violating the plaintiffs’ First and 14th Amendment rights, as well as other federal laws, including the long-dormant 1873 Comstock Act, which, they say, still forbids mailing, shipping, and receiving abortion materials.
In September, a similar lawsuit challenging Illinois’s mandatory insurance coverage for abortion in state courts was dismissed by a judge who noted that the plaintiffs already have a remedy at hand: they can purchase insurance policies that are not regulated by the state. Plaintiffs in that case are appealing.
Asked for comment, Attorney General Raoul said via email, “Abortion is health care.” He is “committed to continuing to protect reproductive rights and . . . access to coverage for reproductive health care that includes abortion.”
Raoul noted, “After my office successfully preserved abortion care coverage protections in the Illinois Reproductive Health Act by winning a motion for summary judgment in Sangamon County Circuit Court . . . I said the fight is by no means over.”
I wondered what Ameri Klafeta, director of the Women’s and Reproductive Rights Project for ACLU Illinois, would have to say about it. “This is a kitchen-sink approach, trying to throw a lot of claims in,” Klafeta told me. “They lost in the general assembly on this, they lost in state court, and now they’re coming back to try in federal court.”
All of these claims have the same flaw, Klafeta said. “This is a law that applies to insurance companies. It is not targeting anybody’s religion. And the law serves a very important purpose: insurance coverage is crucial for access to care. They’re trying to attack access.”
This legal challenge is not only about paying into an insurance pool. It’s about the larger agenda of eliminating choice, whether you like it or not.