Dem governors pledge to protect abortion as neighbors add restrictions
Democratic governors in two states that are regional centers for abortion access pledged on Thursday to defend access to the procedure, pushing the federal government to do more and warning against further restrictions.
“We’re not an island, we’re an oasis,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said in an interview with POLITICO on Thursday. “People come to Illinois to exercise what are their fundamental rights, and they’re being denied in other states, every state around us, and then another ring of states around them. So think about how if you want to exercise your rights, how far you have to travel if you don’t live in Illinois in order to exercise those rights.”
Abortion access has come to the center of the national political stage since last June, when the Supreme Court reversed decades of precedent establishing a Constitutional right to the procedure and instead left its legality up to states, dozens of which — largely in the Midwest and the South — have since imposed restrictions or total bans. Pritzker, a second-term governor, signed a state law in January providing legal protections to out-of-state residents seeking abortion care in Illinois.
The Illinois governor on Thursday called on the federal government to not only enact a federal law legalizing abortion nationwide but also to assist people who have to travel from their home states for access to abortion.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/02/09/democrats-governors-abortion-00082048
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