Filling in for Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer, Jeanne Ives and Jim Iuorio reacted to Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey’s signing of legislation that made Massachusetts the tenth state to permit abortion up to the point of birth. The hosts played a clip from Michael Knowles’ podcast criticizing the signing ceremony and Healey’s characterization of herself as Catholic, and Ives noted that news coverage of the bill often lists ten states in that category without including Illinois, despite Illinois effectively operating under similar rules.
To discuss the issue, the hosts brought on Mary FioRito, the Cardinal Francis George Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who confirmed that Illinois should be counted among the states allowing abortion through all three trimesters. She pointed to a Chicago Tribune story on a Chicago clinic that opened roughly a year ago advertising all-trimester abortion services, along with a second clinic downstate under the same provider. FioRito said that while Illinois law technically sets a 24-week cutoff, the accompanying health exception is broad enough to cover nearly any circumstance, which is why providers are able to market services covering the full duration of pregnancy.
Ives and FioRito discussed Healey’s remarks framing the legislation around families who receive difficult prenatal diagnoses, with FioRito describing that framing as ableist, arguing that a disability diagnosis shouldn’t render a child’s life expendable. She praised Ives for choosing to continue a pregnancy after receiving an adverse diagnosis for her own son, and described perinatal palliative care programs, including one at Columbia Hospital in New York, that provide medical and emotional support to families whose children are expected to have life-limiting conditions.
Iuorio raised the political dimension of the issue, suggesting that opposition to abortion has historically struggled to gain traction because it can be framed as older men imposing restrictions on women, but that the visible enthusiasm at the Massachusetts bill signing might shift public perception. FioRito responded that polling shows more consensus on abortion than the broader political debate might suggest, citing survey data indicating that most Americans oppose abortion after fetal viability, generally around 22 weeks, as well as broad public opposition to procedures performed later in pregnancy and to sex-selective abortion. She also referenced past legislative proposals in California to allow evaluation of newborns with disabilities or life-limiting conditions after birth, and connected concerns about disability-based discrimination to Illinois’ upcoming assisted suicide law, set to take effect next month.
The hosts also played a clip of Illinois Governor JB Pritzker defending abortion access and arguing for a federal law codifying the right to an abortion, which FioRito and the hosts criticized alongside statistics cited on the show, including a 2024 Charlotte Lozier Institute study indicating that most European countries limit abortion after 15 weeks and that the United States is among a small number of countries worldwide permitting abortion at any stage of pregnancy.
FioRito also discussed a recently settled lawsuit against the Equity Clinic near the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in which a patient alleged that a provider perforated her uterus, left fetal remains inside her abdomen following a 22-week abortion, and sent her home to Indiana without adequate care, telling her by phone to take a laxative and Tylenol. FioRito said the provider continues to practice in Illinois after paying a fine and completing continuing education hours, and drew a comparison to the Kermit Gosnell case in Philadelphia, in which regulators and advocacy groups failed to act despite repeated warning signs before several patients died. She said the medical standard of care for late-pregnancy emergencies is delivery, not a multi-day abortion procedure that requires cervical dilation over roughly three days, and argued that performing such procedures in outpatient clinics without hospital admitting privileges creates unnecessary risk.
Before the interview was cut short by a dropped call, FioRito and the hosts discussed a Fox News report on Catholic advocacy group CatholicVote’s call for Massachusetts bishops to excommunicate Governor Healey, referencing canon law provisions on automatic excommunication tied to abortion. FioRito noted that Pope Leo, a co-founder of a pro-life student group at Villanova University who attended the March for Life as both a student and a seminarian, holds strong personal views on the issue, though she said it would be unusual for him to issue an unprompted statement rather than responding to a direct question.