Lorie Chaiten, Reproductive Rights Project Director

This year, the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois’ Bill of Rights Celebration honors the 35th anniversary of our Reproductive Rights Project and the outstanding advocacy of the Project’s dedicated Director, Lorie Chaiten.Our Reproductive Rights Project was formed 35 years ago, a formalized recognition of the work to advance reproductive health and access directed by the ACLU of Illinois for many years. In 1970, the ACLU filed the first case in Illinois challenging the constitutionality of Illinois’ abortion ban, leading to the first legal abortion in the State. That case was pending in the United States Supreme Court when the Court decided Roe v. Wade.

In 1979, Lois Lipton became the Project’s first Director, followed by Colleen Connell in 1984. Lorie Chaiten was named Project Director in 2001, but this is a bit misleading.  Lorie has been a key part of our work for 29 years – since she was a first year associate at Sonnenschein. On staff or as a cooperating attorney, Lorie worked on every reproductive rights case the ACLU of Illinois has litigated since 1985.

Through our litigation, we have protected Illinois from many of the harmful restrictions we are seeing passed in Texas, Ohio, Virginia and many other states around the country. The ACLU has blocked the state of Illinois from enforcing laws that:

• define personhood as beginning at conception;
• impose harmful waiting periods before women can access abortion services;
• bar medically appropriate prenatal testing;
• impose unnecessary abortion clinic regulations;
• require abortion providers to have unobtainable hospital admitting privileges;
• ban so-called “partial birth” abortions;

If not for the ACLU, each of those restrictions would be in effect in Illinois today.

ACLU staff, board and volunteers at the “Women Are Not Livestock” rally