State-funded abortion: Illinois budget includes $24M for ‘reproductive health’ efforts

The state’s spending plan has $2 million in grant funds for freestanding reproductive healthcare clinics, $5 million for training and $4 million for “birth equity” initiatives.

According to the state, birth equity initiatives are efforts that provide “assurance of the conditions of optimal births for all people with a willingness to address racial and social inequities in a sustained effort.”

The plan has been met with mixed reactions.

“Because so many states around us are what they call ‘blacked out,’ meaning there’s no access to any sorts of care, there are fears, and rightly so, that they could lose access to even medical abortion medication,” state Rep. Amy “Murri” Briel, D-Ottawa, told The Center Square.

Devin Jones Republican committeeman of Chicago’s 18th Ward, said state-funded abortion is detrimental to women.

“Less than 1% of abortions are because of rape or incest, right, so the vast majority are financial and convenience issues,” Jones said. “The fact that we’ve built up a society where men, by and large, have made women feel like they cannot afford to do what their body naturally does, which is to give birth to children. To think that there’s something wrong with that, that you can’t have a career, you can’t have an education, we should not have a society where women can’t have children and can’t go to college, can’t work a job, can’t thrive.”

The state-funded abortion efforts are part of what Gov. JB Pritzker called a balanced budget during his 2025 State of the State address last week.

“And responsible,” Pritzker said. “It represents some hard sacrifices and moderated spending. We’re preserving the progress we’ve made over the last six years, streamlining certain departments to do more with less, and delivering for our residents without raising their taxes.”