Political and Legal Barriers to Abortion Training and Care in the Midwest

The Midwest region is host to some of the most harmful legislative and policy-based barriers to providing and accessing reproductive health care, and in particular abortion. These restrictions include, among others, limits on the use of medication abortion, medically unnecessary clinic and administrative regulations, state-mandated lectures and forced ultrasound requirements, limits on insurance coverage for abortion, gestational bans and laws that allow health care providers to refuse to give their patients information and care because of the provider’s religious objections to doing so. Although Illinois is not a progressive state, and its government imposes a number of burdensome restrictions on reproductive health care – litigation, legislative and policy successes have served to limit some such restrictions and have created an environment with greater access to abortion care than elsewhere in the region. As a result, Illinois also presents increased opportunities to offer abortion training not offered in traditional medical training programs. In this presentation, I will describe the political and legal barriers to abortion access and training in Illinois and throughout the Midwest and set the stage for a presentation of the Midwest Access Project’s experience and strategies to overcome such barriers and the work of the Chicago Doula Circle. My presentation will focus on trends in legislative and policy restrictions in the Midwest region as well as specific opportunities and challenges in Illinois for increases in access to care and training for frontline providers.