Oasis by Necessity

Oasis by Necessity:The Post-Dobbs Landscape in Central Illinois Samantha Auerbach (bio) and Julie Laut (bio) travel to urbana-champaign, illinois (u-c) for the first time from any direction, and you may feel you are in the middle of nowhere as you pass through hundreds of miles of flat, agricultural land. Many consider this part of the United States "fly-over country," and residents of Chicagoland just see the region as "downstate." But if you visit this region for any length of time, you will come to see that Urbana-Champaign is intricately connected to the post-Dobbs abortion landscape in the US. Local reproductive justice activists and practitioners, alongside researchers from the University of Illinois campus, have responded to the new abortion landscape through unique collaborations that engage the broader community to work toward reproductive justice for all. Due to its unique geographical position, Illinois has become a critical bastion of abortion access in this post-Dobbs era. States with the most restrictive abortion policy, including those that quickly enacted post-Dobbs bans on abortion, include many that border Illinois: Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Missouri. It appears that Iowa will be the next to fall, as its six-week ban on abortion, which effectively bans all abortion in the state, is on hold due to legal challenges.1 In addition to being geographically situated adjacent to abortion-restricted states, Illinois is the only state in the region to have expanded abortion protections in recent years. The 2019 Illinois Reproductive Health Act, anticipating the fall of Roe, enshrined a fundamental right to reproductive healthcare in Illinois, including abortion.2 Two years later, the Illinois legislature ended the restriction requiring parental notification for abortion services. The omnibus Patient and Provider Act, passed in January 2023, prevents other states from enforcing their restrictions in Illinois, and "reinforces [End Page 511] protections for Illinois health care providers and patients travelling here to access abortion or gender affirming health care."3 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Map of abortion policy by state as of September 26, 2023. http://states.guttmacher.org/policies/. As a result of these additional protections, Illinois has become an oasis for patients traveling to access abortion care among a desert of restrictions. From January to June 2023, Illinois clinics provided an additional 18,300 abortions compared to the same period in 2020, a sixty-nine percent increase.4 Out-of-state patients account for much of this increased need. Planned Parenthood of Illinois clinics saw "a 54% increase in overall abortion care patients," with patients traveling from thirty-four different [End Page 512] states to seek care.5 Statewide statistics do not do justice to the unique pressures put on abortion clinics in central and southern Illinois, however. Hundreds of miles from the resources available in the Chicago area, and often located in politically unfriendly environments, new and established clinics in central and southern Illinois struggle to keep up with the demand. Planned Parenthood of Illinois's Champaign abortion clinic, forty-five miles from the Indiana border, saw an increase of more than eight hundred percent in the number of out-of-state abortion patients in the first year post-Dobbs.6 While Illinois as a whole has become a haven for abortion access, central and southern Illinois have had to make the most rapid adjustments to their abortion care infrastructure. Local activists and organizations have risen to the challenge, determined to support these efforts. Recognizing that a strong, sustainable coalition of reproductive justice advocates is essential to shoring up our local and regional response to attacks on abortion access post-Dobbs, a local activist founded Urbana-Champaign Reproductive Justice (ucrj) in January 2023. Their vision was to leverage the increased public awareness of legal restrictions on abortion and gender-affirming care, to build a grassroots, inter-connected coalition of organizations, practitioners, and community members dedicated to reproductive justice. ucrj's work emphasizes the broader liberatory vision of reproductive justice as defined by SisterSong7: "the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities." ucrj functions as an

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