Reproductive freedom news最新文献

On October 18, the US District Court for the Southern District of Iowa ordered the Iowa Department of Health to withdraw its demand that Planned Parenthood of Greater Iowa obtain a "certificate of need" in order to open a new facility in Davenport. Judge Charles R. Wolle found that state officials had deliberately misused the certificate of need requirement--a policy originally created to allow communities to influence health care standards at local facilities and prevent duplication of medical services--to block the clinic, which far from providing duplicative services would become the only provider of abortions in the Quad Cities. For at least 10 years, no family planning facility in Iowa has been required to obtain a certificate of need, in large part because the review standards are generally regarded as obsolete. The application process would have required Planned Parenthood to publicly disclose its sources of funding, identify the intended site of the facility, and pay a substantial fee; it would also have involved a public hearing at which members of the community could object to the clinic. The court concluded that state officials could not justify applying the requirements to a facility providing abortions when it had routinely failed to apply them to other clinics that offer the same services but do not provide abortions. Judge Wolle further ruled that the state's order for a certificate of need imposes a substantial obstacle to access to abortion that is unjustified by any government interest--and therefore unconstitutional under the standards established by the US Supreme Court in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey. Planned Parenthood Federation of America is representing the plaintiffs in Planned Parenthood of Greater Iowa vs. Atchison.

On September 19, the House of Representatives voted 285-137 to override President Clinton's veto of H.R. 1833, known as "The Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act." One week later, the Senate upheld the veto of the bill, with 41 members voting to sustain the veto and 57 to override it. A two-thirds majority of those present and voting in each house would have been required to overturn the veto. Had the vote succeeded, it would have marked an unprecedented step by Congress to interfere with a medical procedure. The final version of the bill, which was approved by the House in March of this year and the Senate in December 1995, sought to ban an abortion method, technically termed "intact dilation and evacuation" or "dilation and extraction" (D&X), primarily used later in pregnancies in cases in which a woman's life or health is threatened, including cases of severe fetal anomaly (see RFN V/7, IV/22). The measure's vague description of the procedure to be outlawed could have also applied to the most common method of second-trimester abortions. A very limited exception in the bill would have permitted the procedure if a woman's life were "endangered by a physical disorder, illness, or injury," so long as no other surgical procedure could save her; an alternative method would have been required regardless of its impact on the woman's health. Physicians violating the ban would have faced fines and imprisonment for up to two years and would have been liable to suits by women's husbands and the parents of young women needing these procedures.

At a July 19 hearing, the Food and Drug Administration's Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs found mifepristone to be safe and effective in inducing abortions early in pregnancy and recommended that the drug be approved for marketing in the US. With a 6-0 vote with two abstentions, the eight-member panel found that mifepristone's benefits were greater than its risks; agreed, 7-0, with one abstention, that it is safe; voted 6-2 to accept data from a French study as sufficient to recommend use in this country; and decided unanimously to reconvene if results from US clinical trials differ significantly from those from France. While the FDA is not required to follow the panel's advice, it is highly uncommon for it to do otherwise. The advisory panel scheduled the hearing in response to an application filed this spring by the Population Council, the nonprofit organization that owns the US patent rights to the drug. The meeting began with a presentation by the Population Council on the results of an American mifepristone trial that involved more than 2000 women and a discussion of the data from studies and practical use in France. The second session brought public testimony from 33 speakers, the majority of whom spoke in favor of the drug's approval. A company plans to manufacture mifepristone once it is approved but refuses to reveal its identity out of concern that it will be a target for anti-choice protests and boycotts. The drug would be marketed by Advances in Health Technology, Inc., an enterprise designated by the Population Council as the exclusive US distributor of mifepristone--the abortifacient marketed as RU486 in France and used by nearly 200,000 women in Europe and elsewhere.

The United Nations Conference on Human Settlements, also known as the Habitat II conference, met in Istanbul from June 3 to 14. It was the last major UN gathering of this millennium and the first major UN meeting since 1995's Fourth World Conference on Women (the "Beijing Conference")--and thus an important opportunity for a wider international community to weigh in on agreements reached in Beijing and at the International Conference on Population and Development, held in Cairo in 1994. The final document that emerged from Habitat II, the "Global Plan of Action," affirmed crucial elements of those earlier accords. The Habitat documents calls for action to "[d]evelop and implement programmes to ensure universal access for women throughout their life-span to a full range of affordable health care services, including those related to reproductive health care, which includes family planning and sexual health, consistent with the Report of the International Conference on Population and Development." Language adopted at the Cairo meeting is also affirmed in Habitat's call for "universal access to the widest range of primary health care services." Perhaps most significantly, the Istanbul document reiterated an important declaration from the Beijing conference: "While the significance of national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural, and religious backgrounds must be borne in mind, it is the duty of all States to promote and protect all human rights and fundamental freedoms." Most of the 189 UN members and observer states that attended the conference upheld all three of these provisions. Only a small group of states--Argentina, Guatemala, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Malta, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, and the Holy See--filed reservations on the health care sections.