By definition, obstetric and other perinatal care providers always have two patients: a mother and her unborn baby. Both parties are considered equal in value and worthy of the full attention and effort of the provider, and in no case are they viewed as set against one another. Foundationally, obstetricians and midwives are trained to ensure the health and flourishing of both mother and child.

But as the pro-abortion lobby in Illinois has grown bolder and more desperate, especially considering last year’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, there is now an expectation that a growing number of perinatal healthcare providers should be permitted to destroy the very lives they have been trained to guard.

Among other amendments to current state law that endanger the health and safety of preborn babies, HB 3 and HB 1046, both sponsored by pro-abortion Representative Mary Flowers (D-Chicago), seek to expand the list of providers who may perform abortions in Illinois to include—if you can believe it—midwives.

It’s hard enough to believe that some physicians, who take an oath to “first, do no harm,” perform abortions and, in a growing number of states, participate in physician-assisted suicide, but it simply boggles the mind to consider midwives joining in the practice of ending preborn lives. Midwifery is an ancient field; one whose history long precedes the quite recent shift of birthing to hospital wards, in the care of labor and delivery nurses and obstetricians. Midwives are even referenced in the book of Exodus as playing a crucial role in SAVING the lives of God’s people when Pharaoh sought to kill their sons. Under no circumstance have they historically provided abortions. As of right now, Illinois state law prohibits them from performing the barbaric procedures. But that prohibition is now in doubt, thanks to State Representative Flowers and the pro-abortion lobby who fully endorse her work.

The other provisions in these bills are also deeply concerning. For example, in response to growing demand from those who travel to Illinois for abortions in a post-Roe era, these bills would make possible the “co-location” of abortion and birth services in government-funded birth centers. Can you imagine? Depending on which door a mother walks through, her preborn baby may receive care or be killed. It’s even likely the same doctors and midwives would provide both “services.” Does the cognitive dissonance ever become deafening for these men and women? Are their consciences so seared that they can no longer see that they are living in a fatal contradiction?

Another provision removes automatic protections for preborn babies who are born with symptoms and testing that reveals the mother abused illegal drugs and/or alcohol during pregnancy. Until now, the presence of a controlled substance in a baby’s blood, urine, or meconium (first bowel movement) would automatically define the child as “neglected,” allowing for child protective services to step in and, in some cases, remove the child for his or her protection. If passed, this bill will make it so that those protections are only available if a law enforcement agency has a warrant. It’s difficult to imagine how or when this would be enforced in such a pro-abortion environment.

If enacted, these laws would represent the worst delinquency of responsibility by a government body. If there is no recourse for the innocent victim of someone else’s destructive choices, our laws cannot be called just. This is the rare case in which pro-abortion forces are being consistent: they do not view a preborn baby as human; therefore, he is not deserving of justice for something done to him before he is born.

Rep. Flowers’ radical, woke ideology is evident in numerous other parts of the text, from dehumanizing preborn babies by replacing the word “baby” with “newborn,” to scrubbing biological reality by replacing the word “woman” with “parent.” The majority of what is contained in these two bills is fatal to the most vulnerable among us, and yet it is shrouded in terms like “dignity,” “liberty,” and “justice.” While Rep. Flowers and her supporters claim they wish to advance these lofty values, none of them will be available to the precious human lives that will be ended or permanently impaired if these fatally flawed bills are signed into law.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to contact your local state representative and urge him or her to vote against HB 3* and HB 1046* when they come up for a vote on the Illinois House floor. Ask them to acknowledge and protect the sanctity of preborn life, as well as the integrity of those who are trained to deliver these precious babies! (See footnotes below for more information!)

More ACTION: Click HERE to fill out a witness slip in opposition to HB 1046. The Illinois House Public Health Committee has a 9 AM hearing set for Thursday, March 2nd.

-Fill out your name, address, email and phone number. Leave everything else blank or put self.
-Highlight “Opponent” and “Record of Appearance Only.”
-Check Terms of Agreement and click Create Slip.

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*HB 1046 would:

1. Require the Dept. of Public Health to establish “reproductive health clinics” across the state at nonprofit and public medical facilities that will perform abortions, among other services.
2. Allow mid-wives to perform abortions.
3. Eliminates “neglected child” designation if controlled substances found in newborn baby’s system.
4. Provides no disclosure at all to any governmental unit of any medical tests, including if a newborn child has drugs in their system from the mom. 
5. Provides for the mother and newborn child to receive medical care based on World Health Organization guidelines and not “generally accepted medical standards.”
6. Makes provisions regarding birth certificates for stillborn babies. 

*HB 3 (as amended) would: 

1. Provide no disclosure at all to any governmental unit of any medical tests of mom or newborn, including if a newborn child has drugs in their system from the mom.  
2. Changes pronouns to gender-neutral (example: “her and her infant” is replaced with “the patient and the patient’s newborn”).
3. Provide specified rights for patients that would be posted at various healthcare facilities, community centers, and daycare centers statewide.
4. Provide for the mother and newborn child to receive medical care based on World Health Organization guidelines and not “generally accepted medical standards.”
5. Make provisions regarding birth certificates for stillborn babies.

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Warning: Reader Discretion Advised

Leftists in Springfield are still not done using public schools to preach “woke” beliefs to Illinois school children, thereby driving more families out of Illinois—which is a bad thing for Illinoisans who can’t leave—and driving more families out of government schools—which is a good thing except for those who can’t leave.

State Representative Mary Flowers (D-Chicago) has filed a jaw-dropping bill, HB 80, that doesn’t propose merely “standards,” or “guidelines,” or even a type of curriculum. Oh no, Flowers is going for the whole enchilada. If passed, this bill would mandate the teaching of specific books on race and feminism: 20 non-fiction books and 9 fiction. Every book is written by a leftist. There is not one book in Flowers’ list by either a person of color or a colorless person who criticizes or dissents from leftist assumptions on race or feminism.

Flowers’ bill says,

Amends the School Code. Sets forth a list of nonfiction, fiction, and children’s books about racism that shall [must] be required reading for students in every public elementary and secondary school beginning with the 2021-2022 school year. Requires that the instruction in the material presented by each book be age appropriate and taught at the appropriate grade level. Effectively [sic] immediately.

Maybe I missed it, but I can’t remember ever hearing of a lawmaker commanding that every public school in Illinois teach specific books. Did Mary Flowers’ constituents elect her to select texts for their elementary, middle, and high schools?

Having worked with teachers, I can say with a fair degree of certainty, that this bill will not be popular with many of them.

This proposed bill adds to the list of bills and laws that are transforming our government schools into woke re-education camps and our children into leftists. The list now includes the re-introduced REACH Act that will require comprehensive sex ed starting in kindergarten;  the proposed “Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards”; the existing “LGBT” school indoctrination law; the homosexuality- affirming “anti-bullying” law passed in 2010; and the novels, plays, movies, essays, and articles teachers are already choosing to teach.

Here are some of the authors and texts on Flowers’ inclusive list of only leftist authors and texts:

bell hooks: Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

Ta-Nehesi Coates: Between the World and Me

Ibram X. Kendi (born Ibram Henry Rogers): How to Be an Antiracist

Robin DiAngelo: White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

Ben Crump (opportunist extraordinaire in the mold of Al Sharpton and “Rev.” Jesse Jackson): Open Season: Legalized Genocide of Colored People

Jacquelyn Woodson (black and a lesbian, so a two-fer for intersectional identitarians): Brown Girl Dreaming

Jennifer Harvey (self-described “queer, antiracist-committed … white lesbian/dyke” and Drake University religion professor): Raising White Kids

Jennifer L. Eberhardt: Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do

Mikki Kendall: Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot

Layla F. Saad: Me and White Supremacy

Michelle Alexander: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness 

Ijeoma Oluo (identifies as a “a black, queer woman who has often found herself demonized at the convenience of white America): So You Want to Talk About Race

Wesley Lowery: They Can’t Kill Us All

Reni Eddo-Lodge: Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race

Phew. Good thing Coates, Kendi, and DiAngelo are here. No “woke” list would be complete without those three Wokateers—all of whom profit handsomely from the racial division they help foment.

National Review’s Rich Lowry writes this about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book, which Flowers wants to force all public schools to teach:

Coates has to reduce people to categories and actors in a pantomime of racial plunder to support his worldview. He must erase distinctions and reject complexity.

“‘White America’ is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies,” he writes. What is this “white America”? Is it Nancy Pelosi or Ted Cruz? Is it Massachusetts, or is it Utah?

In a monstrous passage about 9/11, he writes of the police and firefighters who died trying to save people from getting obliterated into dust: “They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.”

Really? Firefighters go about shattering the bodies of black people without justification?

I suspect there will be many parents who object to their children being exposed to such a toxic ideology.

Here are just two quotes from the book by racist, pro-“trans,” pro-homosexual feminist Reni Eddo-Lodge titled Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race that Mary Flowers wants to force all Illinois schools to teach:

1.) “[R]acism is a white problem. It reveals the anxieties, hypocrisies and double standards of whiteness. It is a problem in the psyche of whiteness that white people must take responsibility to solve.”

2.) “The process begins with the individual woman’s acceptance that American women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist and sexist.”

We can’t overlook the list of books Flowers’ bill identifies as fiction, which includes Justin Simien’s satirical book Dear White People. One chapter in Dear White People is titled “So You’ve Decided to ‘Go Black’ and Not Come Back,” which has a section on busting the myth of “Giant Penises,” ,” that is, giant black penises:

Thanks to rap music and the tendency to exoticize people of color, the myth of the giant black d*ck has endured for some time. … the stereotype can lead to a number of awkward postcoital conversations and explanations. Though this stereotype might be helpful in wooing and courtship, there are few things less sexy than a man having to explain why his d*ck isn’t as big as his lover had hoped it would be. The truth is the average d*ck length and width is the same for men regardless of ethnic background. In spite of the sometimes helpful wide-angle lens on the iPhone used in d*ckpic-ing, most guys are packing between five and seven inches.

Please don’t send any email messages to IFI expressing anger that we have reported this. If you’re upset, contact Mary Flowers. She’s the person who wants to make this book required reading in Illinois schools.

Flowers also wants to force Illinois schools to teach bisexual Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple, which includes lesbian sex and many references to various characters “f*cking.”

And here’s an excerpt from the novel An American Marriage by Tayari Jones that Flowers wants to force Illinois schools to teach:

Looking down at her outline in the dark, I felt myself wanting to explain again. But I could never tell her that I didn’t want to f*ck her like a man who just got out of jail. I wanted to do it like a man who was home visiting his family. I wanted to do it like a local boy made good. I wanted to f*ck like I had money still, like I had a nice office, Italian shoes, and a steel watch. How can you explain to a woman that you want to f*ck her like a human being?

The married black man in this scene has just been released from spending five years in prison for the crime of raping a white woman—a crime he did not commit. The woman with whom he has sex is a friend—not his wife.

Just curious, who decided graphic lesbian sex was “age-appropriate” for any minor children, and what criteria was used to make such a determination? Who will decide which grade level is appropriate for graphic lesbian sex, language about “f*cking” friends, or about the myth of giant black penises?

While Flowers, evidently a devotee of Critical Race Theory, identity politics, and feminism, includes a few token colorless authors, she includes no ideological diversity, demonstrating that the only kind of diversity that matters to leftists pertains to skin color, biological sex, and disordered sexual predilections. What doesn’t matter is ideological diversity and intellectual exploration on these controversial topics.

In the service of inculcating Illinois minors with “progressive” beliefs about race, feminism, and sexual activities, leftists are fully committed to viewpoint discrimination. They have no interest in teaching children how to think critically via distinguishing sound, coherent arguments buttressed with relevant evidence from fallacious arguments deficient in logic, evidence, and coherence. Instead, they want to teach other people’s children what to think uncritically. Kinda, sorta, maybe sounds more like propaganda than pedagogy.

No one disputes the historical reality of the evil of the slave trade, the institution of slavery, and subsequent Jim Crow laws. Nor does anyone dispute the critical importance of ensuring that history is taught accurately.

The dispute broadly speaking is over how the history of racism should be taught. Many—including blacks—believe the way Critical Race Theory (and BLM and the 1619 Project) addresses slavery in America and its legacy is both imbalanced and inaccurate.

Further, the imbalanced and inaccurate coverage of American history promotes a false picture of an evil and systemically racist America, foments racial division, and robs persons of color of a sense of agency in and responsibility for their own lives.

In the racialist—or some would say racist—theories of those whose writing Mary Flowers wants to force into Illinois schools, there’s a difference between being an “antiracist” and being not racist. Being antiracist essentially means embracing all the beliefs of Critical Race Theory, including forced confession and public repentance by whites, and becoming a community organizer. According to the ubiquitous Ibram X. Kendi,

Being antiracist is different for white people than it is for people of color. For white people, being antiracist evolves with their racial identity development. They must acknowledge and understand their privilege, work to change their internalized racism, and interrupt racism when they see it.

Many believe those dogmatic beliefs are divisive and destructive and will accomplish nothing but feed the greedy Intersectional Industrial Complex. And many non-racist parents do not want their children taught the lie that those who harbor no racist views or engage in any racist acts are still racist by virtue of their skin color or lack thereof.

If Flowers and other leftists are genuinely invested in sound education—which necessarily entails the full and free exchange of ideas on race, race relations, feminism, and sexuality—they could and should revise both this bill and existing curricula on these subjects. They could and should remove half of the non-fiction selections to make room for books and essays by Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, John McWhorter, Carol Swain, Candace Owens, Larry Elder, Jason Riley, Anne Wortham, and Heather MacDonald.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send a message to your state representative to ask him/her vote against this outrageous proposal that usurps the jurisdiction of local school boards and administrators by mandating specific left-wing reading assignments.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Springfield-STILL-Isnt-Done-Indoctrinating-Children.mp3

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Click HERE to learn about supporting IFI on a monthly basis.

 

How did they vote?

On Wednesday evening, the Illinois House of Representatives voted 72 to 45 to ratify SJRCA 4, a completely unnecessary proposal to amend the U.S. Constitution to eradicate sex as a legitimate characteristic on which to base reasonable distinctions.

Click HERE to see how your state representative voted on this legislation, or look at the graphic below.

For more than two hours, state lawmakers debated this issue. The fact that this legislation says nothing about women didn’t dissuade 15 legislators from rising to the microphone to express their support. These advocates included the sponsor, Lou Lang (D-Skokie), Ann Williams (D-Chicago), David Harris (R-Arlington Heights), Steve Andersson (R-Geneva), Stephanie Kifowit (D-Aurora), Laura Fine (D-Glenview), Christine Winger (R-Bloomingdale), Sue Scherer (D-Decatur), Emmanuel Welch (D-Chicago), Carol Ammons (D-Chicago), Kelly Cassidy (D-Chicago), Christian Mitchell (D-Chicago), Dan Brady (R-Bloomington), and Juliana Stratton (D-Chicago).

It is interesting to note that both State Representatives Christine Winger and Dan Brady prefaced their remarks by claiming to be pro-life, even though it is well known that Planned Parenthood is a strong proponent of this legislation precisely because it will expand abortion “rights” throughout the nation and dismantle vital abortion restrictions—including parental notification (or consent) laws.

On the pro-life/pro-family side, eight state lawmakers rose to speak against the ERA, including Pete Breen (R-Lombard), Allen Skillicorn (R-Crystal Lake), Jeanne Ives (R-Wheaton), Mary Flowers (D-Chicago), Tom Morrison (R-Palatine), Terry Bryant (R-Mt. Vernon), and Rita Mayfield (D-Waukegan).

Proponents of the ERA claim that they need one more state to ratify this constitutional amendment for complete victory, even though the deadline for passage expired decades ago and even though five states have voted to rescind their ratification over the years it has been pending. If one more state votes for its passage, the issue will certainly wind up in the courts.

In addition to proponents of the legalized slaughter of human beings in the womb, there is another constituency that is celebrating tonight: people who masquerade as the sex they are not.

Thanks for nothing to the 72 feckless state representatives who demonstrated again why Illinois is such a sorry state.

The official roll call of this vote:

How did they vote?

On Tuesday afternoon, the Illinois House of Representatives recklessly voted 61-54 in favor of genderless marriage (SB 10) with 2 representatives voting present and 1 not voting.
 
The debate raged for over two hours with SB 10 with supporters of the bill filling the time with a constant stream of emotion, personal testimony, and accusations of discrimination. Those who spoke out in favor of natural marriage included State Representatives Jeanne Ives (R-Wheaton), David Reis (R-Olney), Rep. Dwight Kay (R-Edwardsville), Tom Morrison (R-Palatine), Mary Flowers (D-Chicago), and David Harris (R-Mount Prospect).
 
Former House minority leader Rep. Tom Cross joined two other Republicans, Ron Sandack (R-Downers Grove) and Ed Sullivan (R-Mundelein)  in breaking with the party platform and supporting this radical liberal bill.
 
Responding to the many references to the Civil Rights movement, Rep. Flowers stated, “When I was discriminated against, it is not because of who I love, but because of the color of my skin…Homosexuality has nothing to do with race.” Flowers continued, “Even if the legal definition of marriage was changed, those two people will never be married in God’s eyes.”
 
Rep. Kay declared, “I’ve heard nothing today about the Scriptures. The only thing I’ve heard is about human rights. So I guess we’ve backed away from our heritage in this nation which we seem to do quite regularly for the expediency of what we wish to do at the moment. And ladies and gentlemen, that’s pride. That’s a belief that you’re better than the very foundation…which we find in the Scriptures.”
 
The vote came less than two weeks after an estimated 4,000 people descended upon Springfield supporting the definition of marriage as being between one man and woman on October 23rd.

SB 10 will go to the desk of Governor Pat Quinn who has publicly expressed his eagerness to sign the bill.
 
How Did Your Representative Vote?

CLICK HERE for the roll call.

 

To see the full video or separate segments of the debate, CLICK HERE.