This week a high-profile conservative voice offered a reminder that the fight over granting Illinois women access to safe and affordable reproductive health care is far from over. In a Sun-Times op-ed, Cardinal Francis George targeted legislation that affirms women’s legal right to contraception, abortion, and pre-natal care. His inflammatory piece, which ran Wednesday, falsely claimed that the “enemies of human life and religious freedom” here in Illinois are out to “remove the right to conscientious objection to abortion.”

Here’s what’s the Reproductive Health and Access Act (HB2357) would actually do:

The [bill] bars the government from interfering with anyone’s ability to use birth control, carry a pregnancy to term or terminate a pregnancy.

The bill requires all Illinois public schools to teach medically accurate, age appropriate, comprehensive sex education. Parents would be allowed to remove their children from classes if they don’t want them to participate.

The bill makes sure that government-funded health care programs, like Medicaid, cover basic reproductive health care services like family planning, pre-natal care, and pap tests as they do for other health care services.

As Jesse Greenberg noted, the legislation includes no language that would force an objecting, individual physician to perform an abortion or provide contraception -- contrary to conservatives’ misleading claims.

There is, however, an imperative that medical institutions offer timely, professional advice on how to access such care. From the bill:

The objecting health care professional or another health care professional within his or her practice or place of employment provides the patient with timely, accurate, and complete information about the patient’s care options in a balanced and professional manner; [...]

The objecting health care professional or another health care professional within his or her practice or place of employment assists the patient in obtaining such care in a timely fashion.

As advocates point out, the bill is necessary because women are too often subjected to undue scrutiny over legitimate medical decisions or priced out of such care altogether.

Many others are simply undereducated about sex because of others’ personal views. For an example of why this matters, check out WBEZ’s recent report on the crippling aftermath stemming from the lack of such guidance at one Chicago high school.