“People Woke Up and Realized This Is Real”: Blue State Are Readying for a Post-Roe World.

Kelly Cassidy saw this day coming.

Some of her colleagues in the Illinois state general assembly thought she was being “hyperbolic,” she says — maybe even “hysterical.” But the Chicago Democrat, a longtime reproductive rights advocate, saw the “fertile seeds” that the anti-choice movement had spent years planting starting to blossom into a grave threat to abortion rights, and led an effort to build a “firewall” of laws to protect and expand access to the procedure — including the Reproductive Health Act she sponsored, which was signed by Democratic Governor J.B. Pritzker in 2019 to make abortion a “fundamental right.”