Assembly Bill A5499 (passed 4 April 2022 101-47) and Senate Bill S470 (passed 31 May 2022 43-20), “Authorizes the commissioner of health to conduct a study and issue a report examining the unmet health and resource needs facing pregnant women in New York and the impact of limited service pregnancy centers on the ability of women to obtain accurate, non-coercive health care information and timely access to a comprehensive range of reproductive and sexual health care services.”
It will now head to the New York Governor’s desk for final signature.
The commissioner would be empowered to demand from pregnancy centers a wide range of information about their operations, including confidential internal documents and medical records. A nine-member temporary task force would then make “recommendations for solutions to address any service gaps or negative impact in the state identified through the study.”
Both the New York Assembly and Senate have made it a priority to protect abortion rights as the 2022 legislative session comes to a close.
The task force would be stacked with abortion providers and abortion rights advocates.
This bill is inherently designed to find fault with pregnancy centers. It assumes at its core that all women want are providers who conduct abortions and prescribe contraceptives, which we know is false. Its true purpose is harassment.
According to the Illinois Department of Public Health, in 2020 alone a reported 46,243 babies in Illinois were victims of abortion — that’s 127 abortions each day, or one baby aborted every 15 minutes.
“Chicago will continue to be a ‘haven’ for people in need of abortion and other forms of reproductive health care,” Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot pledged.
Aid for Women is continually monitoring the legal landscape. But we need your help to ensure that our centers stay open, as each of these unexpected pregnancies represents a crisis for the mother. Abortion often does not resolve the underlying problems in the mother’s life and instead inflicts additional emotional suffering.
Aid for Women stands ready to meet the needs of women throughout Chicagoland supporting them to choose life.
Questions? Please contact our office at (312)621-1107 or email contact@aidforwomen.org.