The Biden administration on Monday reversed a ban on abortion referrals by family planning clinics, lifting a Trump-era restriction as political and legal battles over abortion grow sharper from Texas to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The first Women’s March of the Biden administration headed straight for the steps of the Supreme Court on Saturday, part of nationwide protests that drew thousands to Washington to demand continued access to abortion.

For many homeless people in the Chicago area, finding a safe space to recover from illness or injury is a challenge, especially during a pandemic. Medical respite centers aim to offer that refuge through medical care and support services.

Hospitals in parts of the state are facing a critical shortage of available beds in their intensive care units. The highly contagious delta variant of COVID-19, combined with low vaccination rates, has created an overwhelming situation for medical providers for the last month.

Massive government relief passed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic moved millions of Americans out of poverty last year, even as the official poverty rate increased slightly, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday.

As a Texas law that bans nearly all abortions in that state goes into effect, we take a look at what reproductive health care means for Black women. 

Nearly a year and a half into the pandemic, some health care workers are reporting feelings of burnout. We talk with medical professionals about what they’re seeing during the latest surge of COVID-19.

A new law in Illinois will require health insurers to cover medically necessary services and treatments for mental health conditions and substance use disorders. Advocates say the legislation comes at a critical moment and will help remove obstacles to such care.

The latest surge in coronavirus cases is overwhelming many intensive care units, causing hospitals and states to run out of ICU beds in some locations. A maxed-out ICU can become a staffing and logistical nightmare.

Across the country, hospital systems are facing a shortage of nurses. In Cook County, the shortage prompted nurses at Stroger Hospital to go on strike this summer, for the first time in decades.

While 84% of nursing home residents in Illinois have received the COVID-19 vaccine, just 62% of the workers who care for them are fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The rapidly escalating surge in COVID-19 infections across the U.S. has caused a shortage of nurses and other front-line staff in virus hot spots that can no longer keep up with the flood of unvaccinated patients and are losing workers to burnout and lucrative out-of-state temporary gigs.

Illinois is among a handful of Democratic-run states extending health insurance coverage to adult immigrants in the country illegally, including seniors.

“Access to birth control should never be determined by economic status, education or ZIP code. Birth control is a basic health care service. It should be treated as such and readily available for all,” said state Sen. Melinda Bush, a co-sponsor of the bill. 

Black Chicagoans die more than nine years sooner than other Chicagoans, a gap caused by systemic racism that is only growing, according to a report released this week by the Chicago Department of Public Health.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports the COVID-19 vaccine can cause swelling in the lymph nodes in the underarm where women received the shot, which the agency says is normal. But that swelling can appear in mammograms. Here’s what you need to know.