Tribune Columnist Dennis Byrne Blogs About Parental Notice Developments
Posted by Thomas More Society (May 29, 2010 at 11:17 pm)
Chicago Tribune columnist Dennis Byrne has posted a great piece on his Barbershop blog about the decades long struggle to enforce the Illinois Parental Notice of Abortion Act.
The law, which requires girls under 18 to notify at least one parent before procuring an abortion, passed with bi-partisan support in 1995 and has been under constant attack from the ACLU and the abortion lobby who have found every conceivable way of blocking the actual enforcement of the law.
Although the ACLU’s federal lawsuit, claiming the 1995 law violated the federal constitution was finally rejected last August, 2009, by the U.S. Court of Appeals at Chicago, the Illinois Medical Disciplinary agency (whose executive director has ties to Planned Parenthood) allowed a “grace period” for abortion providers to give them more time (after 14 years!) to get ready to comply with the law.
When a second grace period was voted down, the ACLU filed another lawsuit, this time in state court, claiming that the law violated the Illinois State Constitution. This claim, totally baseless, was assigned to Judge Daniel Riley who entered a restraining order (TRO) barring enforcement indefinitely. Although Judge Riley finally dismissed the suit as legally meritless late this past March, he continued his TRO in effect when the Attorney General’s offce—whose duty is to defend Illinois laws—advised him they would agree to continue the enforcement ban in effect indefinitely for the duration of the ACLU’s appeal!
Thomas More Society tried to intervene before Judge Riley for a third time on behalf of downstate county prosecutors, moving to set aside this outrageous ban on the enforcement of a legally valid, fully constitutional law. ACLU filed their appeal and Judge Riley ruled he had no jurisdiction to address the intervention motion. Now Thomas More Society lawyers have appealed the denials of intervention as well as Judge Riley’s refusal to hear their motion to overturn the “stay” so the law could go immediately into effect. Get more in Byrne’s excellent post linked below: