South West Illinois News

Rep. Paul Jacobs (R-Carbondale) sides with abortion opponents amid news of the leaked Supreme Court opinion to overturn Roe v. Wade.

“I am a pro-life Republican and the only physician of any kind serving in the Illinois General Assembly,” Jacobs wrote on his website. “I value life and worked for forty years to improve the quality of life for my patients, both young and old.”

If the Supreme Court does overturn Roe, states such as Texas would immediately create harsher abortion policies via “trigger laws.”

Jacobs acknowledged the ruling would have little effect in Illinois.

“I strongly oppose these policies and have voted to protect the unborn. The Supreme Court’s possible decision on behalf of the unborn will return the responsibility for legislating on the issue of abortion back to the States," Jacobs wrote. "This possible decision will not have an immediate impact on abortion rights in Illinois, no matter what (Governor) J.B. Pritzker or his Democratic cohorts might be trying to sell you. We will unfortunately remain an abortion-friendly state as long as left-leaning politicians run the Illinois government. I am deeply disturbed at the idea that someone from within the Supreme Court, aware of internal deliberations and writings of the Justices, would leak this draft decision to the media for purely political reasons. I also find it unsurprising that Gov. Pritzker is so outraged at the suggestion that the Court would remand these kinds of decisions back to legislators, the direct representatives of the people, as he has shown time and again throughout his management of the COVID-19 pandemic that he prefers one-man control and top-down edicts from the Executive branch.”

A Washington Post-ABC News poll reported that 54% of participants want to uphold the court case that protects a woman's right to choose.

Politico reported the leak May 3. The organization reported: “The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision — Planned Parenthood v. Casey — that largely maintained the right." 

“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes. “We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

For more information about the legal decision, visit Planned Parenthood’s PDF.

Chief Justice John Roberts has called the leak of the draft opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito “absolutely appalling,” CNN reported. The news outlet revealed that the Justices were to have another closed-door conference in Washington on May 12.