Illinois

Abortion is legal in Illinois. In Wisconsin, it’s nearly banned. So clinics teamed up

Published

2 years ago

August 11, 2022

Abortion is legal in Illinois. In Wisconsin, it’s nearly banned. So clinics teamed up

Round two days per week, Natalee Hartwig leaves her dwelling in Madison, Wisconsin, earlier than her son wakes up, to journey throughout the border into Illinois.

“Fortunately it is summer time,” stated Hartwig, a nurse midwife at Deliberate Parenthood of Wisconsin. “For now he can sleep in. However any preparing that has to occur might be on my partner.”

She drives not less than two hours every means, immersed in audiobooks and podcasts as she drives to a clinic within the northern Illinois suburb of Waukegan. She spends her days within the restoration room, caring for sufferers who had abortions and checking their vitals earlier than they go dwelling. She additionally acquired licensed in Illinois and skilled to offer medicine abortion, one thing she’ll have the ability to do just about by telehealth with sufferers throughout Illinois.

Hartwig is actually working half time in Illinois as a result of when Roe v Wade was overturned in June, a Wisconsin legislation instantly took impact that bans practically all abortions, besides to save lots of the lifetime of the pregnant individual. Wisconsin suppliers need to protect entry for sufferers, whereas these in Illinois – lengthy an oasis for abortion rights – want extra workers to assist deal with a surge of individuals arriving from throughout the U.S.

The Waukegan clinic is Deliberate Parenthood of Illinois’ busiest for out-of-state abortion sufferers. After Roe fell, 60% of sufferers got here to this clinic from outdoors the state – principally from Wisconsin. The truth is, the group opened in Waukegan two years in the past with Wisconsin in thoughts, figuring out that if Roe v. Wade did fall, entry to abortion in that state would drastically diminish.

After Roe was struck down, Deliberate Parenthood organizations in each states introduced their partnership. Greater than a dozen workers from Wisconsin – together with medical doctors, nurses and medical assistants – now commute to Waukegan to assist present care.

“It actually required this excellent pairing of provide and demand,” stated Kristen Schultz, Deliberate Parenthood of Illinois’ chief technique and operations officer. “They’d capability with out native demand, and we had the alternative.”

Within the month after the U.S. Supreme Courtroom overturned the landmark resolution, Illinois grew to become much more of an oasis for individuals in search of abortions. Dozens of clinics closed throughout the nation as 11 states within the South and Midwest applied bans, in line with the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit that helps abortion rights and tracks the difficulty.

The inflow of sufferers into Illinois has had one other affect. For years, abortion suppliers have been touring a few times a month to different states like Kansas, Mississippi and Oklahoma, the place their assist was badly wanted.

Chicago OB-GYN Dr. Laura Laursen was one among them.

“Now the script is completely flipped,” stated Laursen, a fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Well being. “That is the place you might be wanted greater than anyplace else.”

Anti-abortion teams oppose the Deliberate Parenthood partnership and are making ready for a marathon effort to limit abortion rights in Illinois. In a press release after the group’s announcement, Amy Gehrke, government director of Illinois Proper to Life, known as it “significantly tragic.”

Serving to to deal with the surge

Contained in the Waukegan clinic, there are typical examination tables, ultrasound machines and hardwood flooring all through. There are additionally indicators of what the area was – a giant financial institution on a busy retail strip – such because the shiny vault within the workers break room.

A number of the Wisconsin suppliers commute to Waukegan just a few instances per week; others just a few days a month.

For Hartwig, affiliate director of medical companies at Deliberate Parenthood of Wisconsin, she’s capable of do extra for sufferers in Illinois than she might again dwelling. At the same time as a nurse with a sophisticated diploma, she wasn’t allowed to offer medicine abortion in Wisconsin. However she will be able to in Illinois, in line with the state Division of Monetary and Skilled Regulation.

“This was actually simply what I used to be all the time purported to do,” Hartwig stated. “There’s nothing that is going to maintain me from serving to our sufferers.”

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Dr. Kathy King, Deliberate Parenthood of Wisconsin’s medical director, stated whereas her workers is devoted to offering these companies, it comes at a price.

“It’s a burden on our clinicians and nurses and medical assistants who’ve younger kids at dwelling,” King stated. “It sounds nice. Positive, we’ll all simply journey right down to Waukegan 5 days per week. However the logistics of that and the sacrifice of doing that on simply individuals’s day-to-day lives takes a toll.”

Nonetheless, this sacrifice has helped. With workers from Wisconsin, the Waukegan clinic now has doubled the variety of abortion appointments obtainable, and so they’re nonetheless ramping up. This additionally frees up different workers to deal with sufferers who come for different wants, like contraception and most cancers screenings.

There was a burst of sufferers from Wisconsin for abortion appointments in any respect Deliberate Parenthood of Illinois clinics — a tenfold enhance within the month after Roe was overturned, from about 35 sufferers a month to 350, King stated. That does not embrace Wisconsin residents who might need sought abortions with different suppliers.

A possible mannequin

The Waukegan clinic has ignited curiosity from abortion suppliers in different close by states. Deliberate Parenthood of Illinois is fielding calls from these in Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio, for instance, Schultz stated.

What Illinois wants is extra workers to deal with extra sufferers. However the place will these further workers come from? The commute from Wisconsin to Waukegan is comparatively quick in contrast with suppliers in Ohio who’d should cross Indiana to get right here.

Throughout the nation, there are different conversations taking place amongst suppliers. The Nationwide Abortion Federation, which has about 500 facility members together with impartial abortion clinics and hospitals, is pairing up people who find themselves in search of jobs at clinics with those who want employees, stated Melissa Fowler, chief program officer on the federation.

Nonetheless, she acknowledged transferring is not a practical possibility for everybody.

“Individuals have lives,” Fowler stated. “They’ve households. They’re deeply rooted of their communities. … And so a state of affairs such as you’re seeing in Illinois and Wisconsin is nice as a result of individuals are capable of keep linked to their neighborhood, not have to maneuver their household and nonetheless have the ability to present care.”

In southern Illinois, many individuals who work in a clinic in Fairview Heights stay throughout the border in St. Louis. It is a roughly 30-minute commute for Dr. Colleen McNicholas, chief medical officer of Deliberate Parenthood of the St. Louis Area and Southwest Missouri.

Throughout her profession, she’s traveled to Kansas and Oklahoma to offer abortions. Now she’s seeing whose experience she will be able to carry to Fairview Heights, corresponding to medical doctors and clinic managers in Arkansas who in a post-Roe world now work in a state that has banned practically all abortions. There’s been a giant uptick in sufferers in search of abortions in Fairview Heights just lately coming from Arkansas, Tennessee and Mississippi.

“Who’s going to offer these companies?” McNicholas requested.

Earlier than the June resolution, sufferers in Fairview Heights sometimes waited three days for an appointment to get an abortion. Now they wait round three weeks — at a clinic that gives abortions six days per week, eight hours a day.

Inside the 12 months, McNicholas stated the clinic would possibly open its doorways seven days per week, 12 hours a day.

She worries even which may not be sufficient to present fast entry to sufferers.

This story was produced as a part of NPR’s partnership with Kaiser Well being Information and WBEZ Chicago.

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Illinois

Schools still rely on cops to ticket kids for minor violations. It's a practice that should stop.

Published

1 hour ago

June 18, 2024

Press Room

Schools still rely on cops to ticket kids for minor violations. It's a practice that should stop.

The Illinois legislative session wrapped up late last month without tackling the pervasive issue of school ticketing, a practice where schools refer students to police to be disciplined for school misbehavior.

As a civil rights attorney at the MacArthur Justice Center, I’ve traveled around the state to witness the impact of these tickets. One of the first ticketing hearings I saw was in Joliet, purportedly for “disorderly conduct”: A girl with stomach problems disobeyed a teacher’s instructions to leave the bathroom, resulting in a referral to the police, an obligation to attend a hearing on a school day and a $150 fine.

Her experience is not unique. Across Illinois, tickets of up to hundreds of dollars are issued for things like littering, swearing or hallway scuffles — behaviors that schools should address internally with evidence-based solutions like restorative practices.

The ticketing practice is a debilitating symptom of a larger problem: the transformation of our classrooms into carceral spaces. Over the past decades, schools and prisons have become more alike in law, policy, and staffing. Courts have granted prisons tremendous control over prisoners purportedly in the name of rehabilitation and safety — and they’ve extended that same power to schools.

As incarcerated people lost the right to write each other love letters, students lost the right to discuss teen pregnancy in their news publications. As incarcerated people lost the right to be free of strip searches, students lost the right to demand probable cause before administrators dug through their purses. Supposedly, this is to let schools teach kids values and keep kids safe — but in practice, we know our education system is failing.

Policymakers have mirrored our judiciary in treating schools like carceral institutions, adopting adult surveillance measures and zero-tolerance rules. Scholars say it’s because of the superpredator myth that came about in the 1990s — the racially coded idea that we would see a wave of “elementary school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches.” The rise of school shootings — perpetrated largely by white young men — only motivated school authorities to intensify their policies. And with inadequate resources to address the complex needs of students with disabilities or trauma, schools resort to pushing “problem” kids out to maintain order.

More cops, fewer social workers

There are serious consequences to these fear-driven shortcuts. As schools pour money into staffing law enforcement officers instead of medical providers and social workers, students can find themselves handcuffed in the halls, interrogated without counsel and ferreted toward a cell.

Research on the school-to-prison pipeline proves that police exposure makes young people vulnerable to future lock-ups. In Illinois, one of the most common ways kids get exposed to police is through ticketing. Investigators found that from 2019 to 2022, police were involved in student incidents about 17,800 times in 200 Illinois districts and in more than half of these incidents, they issued tickets.

Rockford Public Schools, a district serving nearly 30,000 students, is an expert at ticketing. During the past school year alone, they issued 590 police referrals as of March 24. Every Wednesday at 1 p.m., when kids should be in school, Rockford City Hall holds its hearings for municipal tickets. Though kids can be as young as 8, these hearings are not privacy-protected. There’s no right to an attorney. And if a kid doesn’t show up, the default fine is $750.

I’ve also never seen a white student ticketed in Rockford. Data shows Black students are more than twice as likely as their white peers to receive a police referral, and Black students with disabilities are more than three times as likely. The disparity is so stark that the National Center for Youth Law and the MacArthur Justice Center have filed a civil rights complaint against Rockford, alleging violations of federal anti-discrimination law.

The same disparities have been playing out across the state. In spring 2022, the Illinois attorney general’s office launched an investigation into the alleged discriminatory ticketing practice in one of Illinois’ largest school districts. There have been no updates.

To be sure, the safety of our children and a shortage of resources are serious concerns. But over-policing students has turned our schools into punitive institutions that devastate our most vulnerable. We need to do better.

For years, advocates have been trying to pass a bill that will end the ticketing practice — and for yet another year, the state has been resistant. It’s long past time for the state to do the necessary work to reform discipline in schools.

Zoe Li is a Liman Public Interest Fellow and civil rights attorney at the MacArthur Justice Center, where she primarily focuses on policing in schools and police misconduct.

The views and opinions expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Chicago Sun-Times or any of its affiliates.

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Illinois

Professional Golf is swinging through Central Illinois the next two weeks

Published

8 hours ago

June 18, 2024

Press Room

Professional Golf is swinging through Central Illinois the next two weeks

(25News Now) –

The Annika Tour arrived today in Central Illinois as the Redbird Championship at Weibring Golf Course begins tomorrow morning. The tour, which is for players who just graduated or recently graduated from college, is the primary way to making it onto the 2nd-level Epson Tour, which is the primary pipeline to making it onto the top-level LPGA Tour.

The Redbird Championship will last through Thursday, before next week’s OSF Children’s Hospital of Illinois Golf Championship at Weaver Ridge and Metamora Fields Golf Courses. That tournament will also feature the Men’s All-Pro Tour, which is also the primary developmental pipeline for the Korn Ferry Tour and then the PGA Tour.

You can watch 25News – any newscast, anywhere – streaming LIVE on 25NewsNow.com, our 25News mobile app, and on our WEEK 25News SmartTV streaming app. Learn more about how you can get connected to 25News streaming live news here.

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Illinois

IDOA shares proposed reimagining of Illinois State Fairgrounds

Published

15 hours ago

June 17, 2024

Press Room

IDOA shares proposed reimagining of Illinois State Fairgrounds

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (WCIA) — A newly-unveiled master plan for the Illinois State Fairgrounds showcases some proposed upgrades to its events, attendance, and revenue generation.

The Illinois Department of Agriculture (IDOA) and Community Foundation for the Land of Lincoln announced the plans on Monday. If approved, the Fairgrounds will build an onsite hotel, expand sales and marketing staff, and create a “Town Square” south of the Midway to enhance curb appeal and help guests better navigate the grounds.

“The Illinois State Fairgrounds draw hundreds of thousands of visitors from all around the world,” Governor J.B. Pritzker said. “When combined with the $58.1 million we invested in repairs and improvements, this master plan not only creates a future-focused blueprint for continued growth and success, but it also ensures that the Illinois State Fairgrounds are among the best in the nation.”

Concept map credit to Johnson Consulting, MIG, CDSmith, JGMA and Hanson Professional Services, the Illinois Department of Agriculture, and the Community Foundation for the Land of Lincoln.

The master plan began in 2020 after the Community Foundation launched The Next 10. The Next 10 is a community engagement initiative that helps plan for the future of the Greater Springfield Area. The group heavily envisioned a revamp of the State Fairgrounds due to its promising social and economic potential.

“It is our responsibility to plan today for a strong and prosperous future for the Illinois State Fairgrounds,” IDOA Director Jerry Costello II said. “Partnering with the Community Foundation allowed us to develop thoughtful long-term options to revitalize the Fairgrounds and ensure that generations to come enjoy these 366 acres that showcase Illinois agriculture, the state’s number one industry.”

To view the complete master plan and what these ideas could look like, click here.

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