Chicago mayor plans to criminalize pro-life sidewalk counseling

According to Young America’s Foundation, the mayor of Chicago is unleashing a plan to criminally charge pro-life sidewalk counselors with disorderly conduct. A transition report on the city’s official website gave the details.

The 223-page report, called “A Blueprint for Creating a More Just and Vibrant City for All,” highlights the plans Mayor Brandon Johnson has to “establish Chicago as a premier city for gender justice.” Part of the plan includes a misdemeanor charge for pro-life sidewalk counselors that carries a $500 fine for first-time offenders and $1,000 for additional “offenses.”

“The Mayor has pledged to make structural changes necessary for all girls, women, transgender, gender nonconforming, and LGBTQ+ persons in Chicago to thrive. This includes freedom from the fear of violence and discrimination and full access to rights, resources, services, opportunities, and decision-making,” reads the report. “All Chicagoans and people traveling to Chicago to seek abortion care are treated with compassion and receive care safely and efficiently. … The Mayor’s Office is committed to becoming a national model for gender equity and reproductive rights.”

According to the report, the mayor and his office will “enforce Chicago’s ‘bubble zone’ ordinance, which bars individuals from approaching within eight feet of a person within 50 feet of an abortion clinic if their purpose is to engage in counseling, education, leafleting, hand billing, or protest.”

In other words, it seems the mayor wants to prevent women from receiving education about all their pregnancy options. Pro-life sidewalk counselors voluntarily work to help educate women who are considering abortion but will likely not receive all of the facts, resources, and information they need from the abortion business, which sells abortion for profit. Studies show that 64% of post-abortive women felt pressured to abort. At the same time, 67% received no counseling before undergoing the abortion and 79% received no information about available alternatives.

Often, mothers face pressure from parents, boyfriends, employers, and friends to undergo an abortion. Pro-life sidewalk counselors are the support these women need.

Isabel shared that when she became pregnant, her brother said he would not allow her to live with him if she had the baby. Fearing she would be a homeless mother, she decided on an abortion, but outside the abortion business, she was met by a pro-life sidewalk counselor from the Good Counsel Network.

“She greeted me, offered me a leaflet and I decided to talk to her,” explained Isabel, who shared her story at Be Here for Me. “I was lost, I didn’t know what to do with the pregnancy. She asked me why I was there and I told her everything. She was like, ‘If there is any way I could get support for you, would that put you in a position where you felt you did not have to terminate the pregnancy’ and I said ‘Yes, if I am able to get the support, I do want to keep this baby’. So I was assured.”

The Good Counsel Network was able to find Isabel a home and after her baby was born, helped to provide her with baby gear and financial support — “everything I needed to start my life all over again,” she said. “Not just for myself now but for my baby as well.”

Mayor Johnson is denying women in Chicago these same opportunities to freely and confidently choose life for their children, when they may be coerced or wholly uninformed of other help that is available to them.

The bubble zone ordinance states that the pro-life sidewalk counselors are guilty of disorderly conduct if the person they approach does not consent to speaking to them. Note that it considers “engaging in… education or counseling” with the other person to be “disorderly conduct.” The idea of “consent” in the ordinance appears undefined.

The report also says that the mayor plans to fully fund the Office of Reproductive Health at the Chicago Department of Health (CDPH), including raising public awareness surrounding state and city laws and regulations that “ensure access to an abortion.”

It also includes the “[p]romotion of insurance enrollment, including Medicaid, which in Illinois covers both surgical and medication abortions” — in order to offer state-sanctioned, taxpayer-funded killing to more women — “and plans to continue to “support for the Justice for All Pledge, providing direct funding to abortion providers outside of CDPH and abortion support organizations such as Chicago Abortion Fund and Midwest Access Coalition….”

In addition, the report states that the CDPH would be required to provide access to the abortion pill at no cost to women at health clinics that are operated by CDPH.

Illinois is considered an abortion destination state, with few to no protections for preborn human beings.