Metro East Sun

Democratic colleagues appear reluctant to discuss a meeting between a fellow state representative and her constituents in which the lawmaker allegedly offered castration as a solution to abortion.

Rep. Diane Pappas (D-Itasca) discussed the Reproductive Health Act, or House Bill 2495, with a group of women including Wayne Township Republican trustee Jackie Hayden, and was reported to have said, “If we allowed men to be castrated, took the sperm to the bank, collected tax dollars on it for storage, then when it's time, to have the man decide he's ready to begin a family ... well then the problem is solved.”

Messages left by the Metro East Sun for comment from Pappas colleague Rep. Monica Bristow (D-Godfrey) and others have thus far not been returned.

According to the language of HB 2495, every individual has “a fundamental right to make autonomous decisions about one's own reproductive health.” The bill would provide that every individual who becomes pregnant “has a fundamental right to continue the pregnancy and give birth or to have an abortion, and to make autonomous decisions about how to exercise that right.”

Hayden wrote in a commentary posted on the Wayne Township Republican Organization website that Pappas’s remarks “didn’t leave me speechless, but agitated.” She asserted that Pappas “continued to lie about HB2495, such as how she claimed that it was dead.”

Hayden’s piece was also published on April 23 in the DuPage Policy Journal. Repeated messages left at Pappas’ office by the Journal have similarly not been returned, the publication reported.