After a long hard battle, the ERA passed in the Illinois House. The vote came shortly after 8 pm on May 30th. The Equal Rights Amendment passed it's final stage in Illinois with the vote of 72-45 with only needing 71 to pass.
We are grateful for all those legislators who voted against the ERA. Their votes show them for the principled legislators that they are.
We have been successful for a very long time in preventing the ERA from being ratified in Illinois (over 25 years - from 1972 - 1982 and 2003- 2018). Thank you for all you have done through the years to protect women, the unborn child, our families, our religious freedoms, and our society.
Leading pro-abortion groups – including NARAL, the ACLU, and Planned Parenthood -- have strongly urged state courts to construe state ERAs, containing language virtually identical to the language of the 1972 federal ERA proposal, to invalidate laws that treat abortion differently from other “medical procedures,” including laws restricting tax-funding of abortion and laws requiring parental notification or consent for minors’ abortions.
This could be all moot. Some people now argue that the federal ERA proposed in 1972 can be resurrected by state legislatures (the so-called "three-state strategy"). However, in 1982 the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the federal ERA sent to the state legislatures by Congress in 1972 was legally dead.
Illinois Federation for Right to Life, strongly urged legislators to oppose this resolution for two reasons: (1) The language of the proposed 1972 ERA, which cannot now be revised, is virtually identical to language that the major pro-abortion groups have used in other states (including New Mexico) for highly successful legal attacks on laws protecting unborn children and limiting tax funding of abortion. (2) The Illinois resolution is part of an effort to evade the federal constitutional amendment process spelled out in the U.S. Constitution itself. When Congress proposed the ERA to the states in 1972, it attached a deadline — a deadline that most of the ratifying states explicitly referred to in their ratification resolutions, and that expired decades ago. In 1982 the U.S. Supreme Court explicitly declared that all legal issues surrounding the 1972 ERA resolution (including the validity of rescissions passed by five ratifying state legislatures prior to the deadline) were “moot” because this ERA was already dead.
In more recent years, ERA supporters in Congress have repeatedly introduced new ERA proposals, implicitly recognizing that the 1972 ERA is long dead. For example, such new ERAs were introduced in January, 2017, for the current 115th Congress, as S.J. Res. 6 and H.J. Res. 33.
Pro-life members of Congress have proposed the addition of a simple “abortion-neutral” clause before any such new ERA is sent out to the states for possible ratification – a proposal so far rejected by the leading advocates of the ERA.
It should be obvious that limits specific to abortions are by definition a form of sex discrimination and therefore impermissible under ERA – can be used to invalidate any federal or state restrictions even on partial-birth abortions or third-trimester abortions (since these are sought “only by women”); the federal and state “conscience laws,” which allow government-supported medical facilities and personnel — including religiously affiliated hospitals — to refuse to participate in abortions; and parental notification and consent laws. Indeed, the ACLU “Reproductive Freedom Project” has published a booklet that encourages pro-abortion lawyers to use state ERAs as legal weapons against state parental notification and consent laws.
Our fight is not over. We will educate our elected officials in Congress so that they will be prepared if and when the supporters of the ERA ask them to retroactively extend the time deadline of the ERA. These are vitally important issues that we must continue to protect. We may have lost this battle, but the war is not over.
For more information about the ERA visit: http://eagleforum.org/topics/era.html
For additional documentation on the ERA-abortion connection, see the NRLC website at http://www.nrlc.org/federal/era.
Roll Call on the ERA vote: (click image to enlarge)
