By Hilary White
CHICAGO, March 3, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Abortion advocates in Illinois are pleased that the US District Court for the Northern District Illinois has ruled that the state’s Parental Notification Act, first passed in 1985, will continue to not be enforced.
A 1996 court order halted the law saying that there were insufficiently clear rules regarding appeals for the notification. Courts have since then repeatedly prevented its being enforced. In 2006, however, the Illinois Supreme Court issued clarified rules for notification of parents, but on Friday, U.S. District Judge David H. Coar called these rules “contradictory and incomplete”.
“We’re very pleased,” Lorie Chaiten of the Illinois chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union told the Associated Press. “This should be the end of that law.”
The legislation required a physician to notify an “adult family member” in person, or by telephone at least 48 hours before performing the procedure. The law contained exceptions if the attending physician were to certify that the abortion was for a “medical emergency” or if the minor declared in writing that she is a “victim of sexual abuse, neglect, or physical abuse by an adult family member”. Minors could bypass the law with a court order.
The law, as it was updated in 1995, says, “that notification of a family member [of an intended abortion] … is in the best interest of an unemancipated minor, and the General Assembly’s purpose in enacting this parental notice law is to further and protect the best interests of an unemancipated minor.”
The law recognized that the “medical, emotional, and psychological consequences of abortion are sometimes serious and long-lasting” and noted that the ability of a young woman to get pregnant and her ability to make a “mature judgement” about abortion “are not necessarily related”.
Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan is expected to appeal the ruling to the US Supreme Court