The Quad Cities National Organization for Women (NOW) will hold a Rally for Reproductive Freedom on Sunday, Jan. 18 in Rock Island, near the 53rd anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion before being overturned in 2022.
The rally will begin at 1 p.m. at the former Rock Island County Courthouse lawn, 2nd Avenue and 15th Street, Rock Island. Maria Bribriesco, long-time NOW member and Scott County supervisor, will speak before the group marches around the downtown area.
The rally location at the foot of the Centennial Bridge aims to draw attention to the dramatic change in a woman’s right to choose when she crosses the bridge.
In Illinois, abortion is legal until fetal viability, between 20-25 weeks of pregnancy. In Iowa, since July 2024 abortion is banned once a fetal heartbeat is detected, which is usually at 6 weeks, which is before most women know that they’re pregnant.
“The change in a woman’s reproductive rights between the states is dramatic,” said Leslie DuPree, president of Quad Cities NOW. “Women and their families should not lose care from one state to another.”
She said the goal of the rally is to draw attention to the issue of reproductive rights.
“It would be easy, in the blizzard of bad court decisions under the Trump administration, for people to forget that women have lost this right,” she said.
“It's really a stark difference,” DuPree said Monday of Democratic-led Illinois versus Republican-led Iowa. “In Iowa, most abortions are banned after six weeks, which, you know, most women wouldn't know they were pregnant at six weeks.”
“Even some of the other things that you might consider, such as waiting periods or counseling or other things, Iowa has a pretty heavy hand, and Illinois has gone to a lot of trouble to make it easier on women and their families to get care,” she said. “So once you cross that bridge, the change is pretty dramatic. And we feel that families should have the same care available to them wherever they live. They shouldn't have to travel. In 2024, more than 1,500 women had to leave Iowa to get abortion care. It shouldn't be like that.”
Quad Cities NOW is one of the oldest NOW chapters in the nation, founded in 1970, and the only bi-state chapter. DuPree said they usually have an abortion rights rally every January, in honor of the Roe v. Wade ruling, which was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in July 2022.
Landmark decision
The Supreme Court issued its landmark Roe v. Wade decision on Jan. 22, 1973, when the court ruled that the Constitution of the United States protected the right to have an abortion prior to the point of fetal viability.
The high court overturned Roe on June 24, 2022, leaving the regulation of abortions to the states. The Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case concerned the constitutionality of a 2018 Mississippi state law that banned most abortion operations after the first 15 weeks of pregnancy.
Jackson Women's Health Organization—Mississippi's only abortion clinic at the time—had sued Thomas E. Dobbs, state health officer with the Mississippi State Department of Health, in March 2018.
By overturning Roe v. Wade, which for nearly 50 years protected the federal Constitutional right to abortion, the Supreme Court gave states total leeway to restrict abortion or prohibit it altogether, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights.
The group predicted almost half the states were likely to enact new laws as restrictive as possible or seek to enforce previously unconstitutional laws prohibiting abortion, the center website says. “We are seeing states divide into abortion deserts, where it is illegal to access care, and abortion havens, where care continues to be available.
“Millions of people living in abortion deserts, mainly in the South and Midwest, are forced to travel to receive legal care, which results in many people simply being unable to access abortion for a variety of financial and logistical reasons,” the center says.
Illinois continues to treat the most out-of-state patients seeking abortions compared to every other state in the country, a report on national abortion trends found.
Illinois provided 23% of all abortions for people traveling across state lines for care in 2024, more than anywhere else in the U.S., according to the report from the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization that supports abortion rights.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade, Illinois has become a major haven for people seeking abortion care in the Midwest and the South. Before the ruling, a small percentage of abortions were provided to out-of-state residents.
But that figure has sharply and steadily risen in the years since, especially as states both near and far enact restrictive laws and near-total bans on abortions. In Indiana, abortion was completely banned, with very limited exceptions, in 2023. In July 2024, Iowa passed a ban on abortions once a fetal heartbeat is detected, usually after six weeks of pregnancy.
A total of 13 states ban abortions entirely, including Texas, Idaho, North and South Dakota, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Mississippi and Alabama, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights.
They consider nine other states hostile to abortion rights (with a variety of restrictions), including Iowa, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Impact on Iowa
More Iowans are now traveling out of state for care to places like Illinois, Minnesota and Nebraska. According to Guttmacher data, 1,080 Iowans left the state to get an abortion in 2023 and that increased to 1,530 in 2024.
State data shows that there were 1,792 total abortions for Iowa residents in 2024, which is down from 2,771 abortions in 2023 and 4,061 in 2022.
The Guttmacher Institute estimates that before the law went into effect, there were about 400 abortions per month in Iowa. After, it dropped to about 260 abortions per month.
Guttmacher's numbers are higher than state figures because they include Iowans who receive abortions through telehealth appointments with out-of-state providers, according to Isaac Maddow-Zimet, a data scientist at the Guttmacher Institute.
“They're doing their best to try to prevent women from getting telehealth medical abortions,” DuPree said of pro-life groups in Iowa.
“One of the things that I think people in Iowa need to think about is that even though Iowa has one of the most restrictive laws, there are people in Iowa who want to take it further and ban medical abortions in Iowa,” she said of the use of prescription mifepristone and misoprostol.
Medical abortion ends an early pregnancy by using a combination of these medicines, which stop the growth of the pregnancy and cause the uterine lining to shed.
“So the medication abortions in Iowa, there's no bill before the legislature yet. But the people who were behind some of the Iowa abortion problems in the past are already talking about they're going to get a bill to the legislature to ban medical abortions, which would be a tough thing for the rest of whatever rights families still have,” DuPree said.
Republican Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds is not running for re-election in November 2026, but a new Democratic governor wouldn’t guarantee changes in abortion laws.
“It would take a lot of change because it's the legislature,” DuPree said. “The GOP has such an overwhelming majority in the legislature that the Democrats would have to flip a lot of seats.”
About 85 percent of all abortions for Iowans are medical abortions, she noted.
Exceptions to the Iowa abortion ban are:
- Rape: A pregnancy that is the result of a sexual assault that is reported to law enforcement or a health care provider within 45 days.
- Incest: A pregnancy resulting from a sex act between “closely related persons” that is reported to law enforcement or a health care provider within 140 days.
- Medical emergency: An abortion can be performed to save the life of a person whose life is endangered by a physical condition, but not by a psychological condition. According to the definition of medical emergency in Iowa law, an abortion can also be performed “when continuation of the pregnancy will create a serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman.”
- Fetal abnormalities incompatible with life: A physician provides written certification that a fetus has an abnormality that is incompatible with life.
Regarding the Jan. 18 rally, DuPree said: “One of the goals is just general awareness, and two, so that people in Iowa, when they vote for their state legislators or when they email or call them to say, do not restrict medical abortion in Iowa. I know plenty of people who would be able to write a cogent letter about this to their legislators, whether it would help or not.”
“My feeling is, from what I'm reading, is that most Iowa legislators are not interested in this issue at all, which is probably a good thing,” she said. “They have a lot of other things to worry about. They're worried about taxes and various other things. I don't think this will come to the top. But if people are proactive now and say, don't do this, that would help keep it down on the list.”
Impact on Illinois
In 2024, 35,000 abortions were provided to out-of-state residents in Illinois, representing 39% of all abortions performed in the state.
“Illinois is carrying a staggering share of the national need for abortion care,” Chicago Abortion Fund’s executive director Megan Jeyifo said in a statement. “Last year, [Chicago Abortion Fund] took over 16,000 calls from people in 41 states, and we didn’t turn anyone away who was relying on Illinois for care.”
Before Roe was overturned, Planned Parenthood of Illinois only saw 3%-5% of patients who traveled from outside Illinois, Tonya Tucker, interim president of Planned Parenthood of Illinois (PPIL), said in a statement. But now, nearly a quarter of the organization’s abortion patients are from elsewhere.
Since Roe was overturned, PPIL has served 47% more abortion patients overall with 25% of those patients traveling from almost every state. Before Roe was overturned, only 3 to 5% of PPIL patients traveled from another state.
At PPIL’s Carbondale Health Center, which opened in December 2023 on the border of Tennessee, 90% of abortion patients come from out of state. While all PPIL health centers serve patients from outside Illinois, Carbondale alone accounts for one-third of PPIL’s total out-of-state abortion patients.
DuPree said most women are getting abortion medications through telehealth services, not their personal physician. There are many organizations that offer telehealth appointments to women in any state and will mail abortion medications. Aid Access is a good example.
A doctor in Illinois could prescribe these drugs to an Iowa patient if the doctor's licensure covered Iowa. But probably there would be other conditions, such as proof of an ongoing doctor-patient relationship, and receiving the drugs in Illinois, DuPree said.
Legal questions continue to arise about providers who prescribe abortion medications across state lines to patients in states with restrictive abortion laws. New York, Massachusetts, Illinois and California have “shield laws” to provide legal protections for these providers.
The Illinois shield law protects patients and medical providers from legal attacks by other states and expands health care access and options across Illinois. State and local officials also can't give information to out-of-state entities investigating health care that was legally provided in Illinois, including abortions. Interestingly, Illinois is considering amending its existing shield law to mirror New York’s recently enacted law allowing prescribers to request that pharmacies keep their names off prescription labels for the abortion medications, DuPree said.
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