Wheaton City Council candidate and Glenbard North High School teacher Erica Bray-Parker is a Planned Parenthood supporter, but says she has no position on recently introduced bills in Springfield (HBs 2467 and 2495)—heralded by the nation’s top abortion provider—that virtually lift all restrictions on abortion.
“I am not aware of HB 2467 and 2495,” she told the DuPage Policy Journal in an email. “The jurisdiction of Wheaton City Council does not extend to this issue, so I don't have a stance.”
But Wheaton City Council has of late been a launching pad for women to higher office, both in the legislative and executive branches, where elected officials do have a say over how permissive or restrictive the laws covering abortion should be. Former state Rep. Jeanne Ives (R-Wheaton) served three terms in Springfield and challenged (and nearly defeated) Bruce Rauner in the March 2018 gubernatorial primary. Former Lt. Gov. Evelyn Sanguinetti served on the Wheaton City Council from 2011 to 2014.
From Erica Bray Parker's Facebook Page
Abortion bills introduced in Springfield two weeks ago, trumpeted by both Planned Parenthood and the ACLU of Illinois, go even further than the controversial expansion of abortion rights recently approved in New York.
Peter Breen, counsel for the pro-life Thomas More Society, said in a Feb. 21 statement that the “barbaric procedures promoted by this legislation are nothing short of infanticide. These bills go well beyond the recent New York law and would turn Illinois into a third-trimester abortion destination and an underage abortion haven.”
HB 2495, the Illinois Reproductive Health Act, would remove all criminal penalties for abortionists, repeal the partial birth abortion ban on third-trimester abortions, compel private insurers to treat abortion on the same level as contraception and maternity care, and repeal a law that allows a husband to get an injunction to stop his wife’s abortion.
HB 2467 would allow minors to obtain an abortion without parental consent and without the requirement to obtain approval, in that case, from a judge.
Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker has said he wants to make Illinois’s law covering abortion “the most progressive in the nation.” With supermajorities in the House and Senate, the Democrats appear certain to see that Illinois becomes just that.
Last year, Bray-Parker sent post cards out targeting businesses that displayed Ives campaign posters saying that not only would she no longer patronize the business but would tell her friends to stay away as well.
In the note, she called Ives a “racist, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT and actively opposes the rights of American workers.”
On Jan. 22, Ives posted the following comments about Bray-Parker: “She is unfit to represent business owners or any other decent human being. She is a civics teacher at Glenbard North who is uncivil. She is a Democrat Socialist."
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