URBANA — Ever since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, abortion laws have been literally all over the map, and difficult to track. But Robin Fretwell Wilson, a professor at the University of Illinois College of Law, is working to make it easier to keep tabs on abortion laws.
Wilson presented her team’s research on April 10 during Urbana-Champaign Reproductive Justice Week in Champaign-Urbana. The goal is to create a new website designed to help people understand abortion laws across all 50 states.
“We’ve been doing this really since the leaked Dobbs decision,” she said. “We wanted to understand the complexity of state law.”
Wilson said it’s challenging for ordinary people to understand the nuance of abortion laws with existing online trackers.
“[It’s] a hot mess,” Wilson said. “People would never be able to sort out what the law they live under in a given state is, whether that’s a ‘blue’ state or a ‘red’ state.”
The fall of Roe led to a flurry of state referendums over the years to change abortion access. In some states, like Missouri, the access was expanded.
In other states, like Nebraska, the majority did not vote in favor of an amendment to grant full abortion access up until viability. In Illinois, access to abortion and other reproductive health care services was expanded.
What’s already available
There are already many abortion trackers available online, including from The New York Times and the Center for Reproductive Rights.
However, according to Wilson, these sites oversimplify the legal landscape by assigning a single color to an entire state.
“When you go combing through the state laws, you realize there could be 55 different provisions that affect a woman’s access to abortion in her state,” Wilson said. “And they kind of flatten that into a single code in a way that I think is often misleading or wrong.”
U of I law student Sara Peal is a team lead on the project. She said when people don’t understand abortion laws, they may travel out of state to access abortion care when they could qualify to get it in-state.
“There’s a lot of research — like Iowa, in particular, has a lot of people travel outside the state, and it may not be necessary because there is the extension [beyond six weeks] if you’ve been raped or a victim of incest,” Peal said.
What Wilson’s research does differently
The new website will feature a visual interface that shows how different laws apply over the course of a typical 40-week pregnancy — instead of having a single code for each state.
“We’re going to show how all of the different code provisions that are important to regulating access stack up and show people where access starts and stops under specific exceptions under the general time limit,” Wilson said.
One of the greatest challenges is dealing with the ever-changing nature of abortion laws. Wilson called it a “moving target.”
The researchers’ solution is a key feature of the site: an interactive chatbot powered by artificial intelligence and trained using detailed coding of each state’s laws, created by Wilson’s team and a nonprofit communications group.
While legal texts can be difficult to comprehend, Peal said the chatbot will make the understanding much easier, as the users will be able to ask questions like “What does viability mean in Illinois?” or “What is required to qualify for a rape exception in Florida?”
The hope is that the chatbot will update the website based on news about changes to abortion laws. But Peal expects some human input will be needed to keep the site up to date.
A bipartisan project
The law students involved in this project hold differing views – ranging from pro-choice to pro-life, Wilson said.
“I think the one thing that we can all agree on is: Whatever you think about access to abortion or not enough access to abortion — we’re in a law school, and we should be able to agree that people should be able to be put in a position to understand the laws they live under,” she said.
In other words, this project is purely educational. That creates certain limitations for their work: they can’t give legal advice or offer medical guidance. But Wilson said they still hope the site can empower users to seek help when needed.
“We want to tell people the law they live under,” Wilson said. “But if they need more advice that’s specific to them or specific medical advice, we’re going to have a resource page that points people to where they can learn more.”
This year’s Urbana-Champaign Reproductive Justice Week, organized by the nonprofit Urbana-Champaign for Reproductive Justice and its partners, focused on all aspects of reproductive justice: the right to have or not have children, the right to sexual expression and the right to raise families in safe and healthy environments.
Ellie Jones, a law student and organizer of the event, emphasized the importance of involving academic institutions in reproductive justice conversations.
“I think it’s important that academic institutions participate [because of] the credibility that they have,” she said. “That might open it up to more people or make even just the content of a presentation feel more persuasive for people.”
Wilson’s team is planning to release the abortion tracker website in August.
“We want people to come to… an understanding of the facts, whatever their personal moral beliefs about this very difficult topic,” she said. “The best thing that we can do is arm ourselves with knowledge.”