Category: Abortion

New Study Finds That TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) Laws Are More Pervasive and Stringent Than Laws Regulating Other Office Interventions – Datasets and Mapping Tool Now Available on LawAtlas

Temple University Center for Public Health Law Research Leave a comment

Researchers from The University of California, San Francisco’s Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) and Temple University’s Policy Surveillance Program of the Center for Public Health Law Research (CPHLR) published a study yesterday in the American Journal of Public Health, comparing laws governing facilities that provide abortions with laws governing facilities that provide other office interventions (e.g., office-based surgeries and procedures). The study found that laws targeting abortion provision are more numerous, expansive, and burdensome than laws regulating facilities providing other medical interventions.

The study was based on empirical datasets analyzing Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP) Laws and Office-Based Surgery (OBS) Laws, all now available on LawAtlas.org, the Policy Surveillance Program’s website dedicated to empirical legal datasets. The study of TRAP laws is comprised of three individual datasets: Abortion Facility Licensing (AFL) Requirements, Ambulatory Surgical Center (ASC) Requirements, and Hospitalization Requirements (HR). Detailed descriptions of the TRAP datasets are below.

These three datasets complement a dataset analyzing Office-Based Surgery (OBS) Laws. This fourth dataset was included to study facility requirements imposed on abortion providers in comparison to other medical facilities.

Institutional Conscience, Individual Conscience

cnicheileachai Leave a comment

The debate over compulsory coverage for contraception rages on, with Notre Dame changing their policy on coverage for birth control again under Trump executive order allowing them to do so. The university had initially claimed that a requirement mandating them to provide contraceptive coverage was a burden on its exercise of religion, and discontinued coverage last October, before quickly reversing course after a protracted outcry from students, faculty and staff. Over 17,000 people are currently covered by the institution’s insurance plan. The university’s current position is to cut coverage for birth control that the university considers to be inconsistent with Catholic teachings; continuing coverage for ‘simple contraception’ while discontinuing coverage for contraception that ‘kills a fertilized egg’.  

The Affordable Care Act required that insurers cover the cost of contraception without any out-of-pocket costs by the claimant, with exemptions for houses of worships and closely-held for-profits, with the proviso that organisations that wished to avail of the exemption must notify the federal government, who would then contract directly with the insurer to provide unimpeded access to birth control for employees and their dependents. Under Trump administration rules, the exemption has been expanded to include non-profit organizations and for-profit companies, including public corporations, and a separate HHS rule allows similar moral objections for most institutions.

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Why Are So Many American Women Dying in Childbirth?

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By Clíodhna Ní Chéileachair

In November Serena Williams, indisputably one of the greatest – if not the greatest – tennis player in history gave birth to her daughter by emergency Caesarean section. After the surgery, Williams reported to an attending nurse that she was experiencing shortness of breath and immediately assumed she was experiencing pulmonary embolism. The star athlete has a history of blood clots and had discontinued blood thinners before the surgical delivery. Contrary to William’s requests for a CT scan and blood thinners, medical staff assumed that pain medication had made her confused. A later CT scan confirmed Williams’ self-diagnosis. Stripping out the fact of Williams’ identity turns this near-miss into a terrifyingly common story in US maternal care, albeit one with a happier ending than many. The global trend in maternal death rates – the rate of women dying in childbirth and post-childbirth – has rapidly decreased over the past 15 years. At the same time, the US, despite recording one of the highest per capita income levels in the world, has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the developed world.

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Medical Abortions and the Internet

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by Clíodhna Ní Chéileachair

Early last summer, Facebook removed Women on Web’s page for ‘promoting drug use’. The Amsterdam-based organization connects women with doctors who prescribe the pills necessary for medical abortions and provides information on taking abortion pills, on contraception and on accessing abortion services in states where access to safe abortions is restricted or illegal. This followed an earlier interaction in which Facebook removed a photo of the organization’s founder, Rebecca Romperts, superimposed with instructions on the use of the pills. Facebook later apologized and reinstated the Facebook page, claiming that the removal was an error, and that the page served Facebook’s function of allowing individuals to organize and campaign for the issues that matter most to them.

Leaving aside the question of whether it was indeed an error, WoW have never existed without controversy. In February of last year, their sister organization Women on Waves made headlines when their boat was detained by the Guatemalan authorities while campaigning in Guatemalan waters. Women on Waves provides medical abortions to women once they are in international waters and thus operating under Dutch law, which allows abortions up to 21 weeks. Both organizations will provide access to abortion services up to 9 weeks, using a combination of medicines – misoprostol and mifepristone – which together induce abortion. The WHO estimates that the drug combination is used by 26 million women globally per year and is recommended as an abortifacient up to 9 weeks of pregnancy. Women on Waves are one of many organizations that aim to allow women to access abortion services that are either explicitly illegal, or practically unavailable in their home countries. There are risks associated with taking the drug combination, but these are minimal, and far riskier is the danger of leaving women with access to illegal abortions which is often the reality of full abortion bans. In Guatemala, 65,000 women have illegal abortions every year, with a third of that number admitted to hospitals from complications associated with the backstreet procedure. A medical abortion before 10 weeks is safer than childbirth, and as safe as a natural miscarriage. Both drugs have been on the WHO’s list of essential medicines since 2005. Studies show a high level of effectiveness in self-sourced and administered abortion pills, such as the service offered by Women On Web, and outcomes generally compare favorably with in-clinic administration. Underscoring the importance of safe access to the drug combination, use of the pills is often studied as a self-administration method alongside getting punched in the stomach, taking herbs or homeopathic medicines, deliberately taking a high dose of hormonal pills, alcohol and illegal drugs.

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Morality, Maturity, and Abortion Access in the US

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by Clíodhna Ní Chéileachair

In the complex web of restrictions on abortion access, parental consent laws and judicial bypass mechanisms play a small, but hugely significant part. States are entitled to enact parental consent and notification laws in relation to abortion care for minors, as long as they allow minors to ‘bypass’ this requirement judicially, an attempt to account for the myriad circumstances in which it will be impossible, difficult or dangerous for teens to tell their parents about their pregnancy and their wish to end it. Finding different justifications in different contexts, some laws appeal to the perceived immaturity of the individual in arriving at a decision without adult intervention; other legal schemes emphasize the critical importance of respecting the family unit, and by extension, the ability of parents to determine the medical treatment their child will receive. The exact stats, state by state, are available here.

The patchwork regime which governs the US rules on abortion access, administered by local courts presiding over the individual applications of pregnant teenagers, is a highly dysfunctional one, where standards of judgment can be entirely capricious. Judges are, after all, not medical professionals, nor are they therapists, health experts or developmental psychologists. The standard criteria pronounced upon by a judge at a bypass hearing is whether the minor is ‘mature enough, and well enough informed to make her abortion decision, in consultation with her physician, independent of her parents knowledge’ or that ‘even if she is not able to make this decision independently, the desired abortion would be in her best interests’. The gateway for unchecked judicial discretion is gaping. Markers of maturity are wholly subjective determinations, as are the metrics to determine whether a minor is sufficiently informed, or where her best interests lie. After all, for a staunchly anti-abortion judge, it is entirely possible that no-one could be informed about the process of abortion and yet rationally seek it, or that it could never be in an individual’s best interests to receive abortion care as a minor. The controlling law doesn’t foreclose on these possibilities.

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The Mexico City Rule and Maternal Death

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By Clíodhna Ní Chéileachair

The ‘Mexico City Rule’ is a Reagan-era regulation which bars US funding to worldwide NGOs which provide counselling relating to abortion, or referrals for abortion services, or which advocate for the expansion of abortion access. The regulation is a sticking point for the two-party reality of US politics, and has been rescinded by every Democratic president since Reagan, and reinstated by each Republican president. Trump is no exception, and his administration’s approach to the policy has been exceedingly expansionist; where the policy traditionally only applied to aid tied to family planning projects, the policy now extends to all international health care aid provided by the US government, amounting to almost $9 billion every year, and covering US aid policies in the areas of family planning and reproductive health, infectious diseases, TB treatment, children’s health, nutrition, HIV/AIDS prevention, water and sanitation programs, and tropical diseases.

The effect of the policy extends past the years in which it is actively in place. Population Action International reports on a reluctance on the part of US governmental officials and non-governmental partners to enter into agreements with organizations that may be ineligible for funding in the future based on the putative reinstatement of the policy, in effect operationalizing the policy beyond the times in which it is in active effect. Beyond the expanded remit given to the policy by the Trump administration, and the temporal expansion based on likely reinstatement, the wording of the policy itself goes some way to expanding the scope of the policy beyond what might be necessary in a vacuum. The structural effect of the policy is to prevent the funding of abortion access with US aid money (an outcome which is illegal regardless through the Helms Amendment) and abortion advocacy. The policy contemplates a neat categorization of organizations such that it is possible to carve out the aspects of a healthcare organization that deal with abortion care as an aspect of reproductive health and justice. Read More

Ireland’s Abortion Referendum and Medical Care in Pregnancy

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By Clíodhna Ní Chéileachair

This week, Ireland made international headlines as the governing political party announced a date-range for a referendum on the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution, the provision which recognizes a fetal right to life, and places it on an equal footing to the right to life of the woman carrying the fetus. The move wasn’t a surprise to Irish voters – the referendum had been promised by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar since his election last June, and comes after decades of protest and organization by a multitude of activist groups, protesting what they view as an archaic, unworkable and agency-destroying constitutional provision that has led to the exporting of abortion care for Irish woman to the UK and Netherlands, and the deaths of women in Ireland. The implications of the Eighth Amendment for access to abortion care are obvious enough – it is illegal in almost all cases. Less prominent has been the pronounced effect that this constitutional ban on abortion has had for medical treatment and care in pregnancy, where the doctor involved is, constitutionally speaking, treating two patients with equal rights to life.

The only scenario in which an abortion in Ireland is legally permissible is in cases where the woman’s life is at risk from the continuance of the pregnancy. In all other cases, including cases where the fetus is non-viable, where the pregnancy is a result of rape or incest, or where the fetus will risk the health of the woman, but not her life, abortion is illegal. Criminal punishment for illegally procuring an abortion runs to a prison term of 14 years, which includes doctors who provide illegal treatment. Women who can afford it travel to the United Kingdom to avail of abortion services there, but doctors in Ireland cannot legally refer their patients to clinics in the UK, even in cases where continuing the pregnancy risks the health of the woman. It is unknown how many women have ended a pregnancy with illegal, imported abortion pills.

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Book Launch: Law, Religion, and Health in the United States

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff 2 Comments

Book Launch: Law, Religion, and Health in the United States
September 27, 2017 12:00 PM
Wasserstein Hall, Milstein West A (2019)
Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA

In July 2017, Cambridge University Press will publish Law, Religion, and Health in the United States, co-edited by outgoing Petrie-Flom Center Executive Director Holly Fernandez Lynch, Faculty Director I. Glenn Cohen, and Elizabeth Sepper, Professor of Law at Washington University School of Law. This edited volume stems from the Center’s 2015 annual conference, which brought together leading experts to identify the various ways in which law intersects with religion and health care in the United States, examine the role of law in creating or mediating conflict between religion and health care, and explore potential legal solutions to allow religion and health care to simultaneously flourish in a culturally diverse nation.

About the book: While the law can create conflict between religion and health, it can also facilitate religious accommodation and protection of conscience. Finding this balance is critical to addressing the most pressing questions at the intersection of law, religion, and health in the United States: should physicians be required to disclose their religious beliefs to patients? How should we think about institutional conscience in the health care setting? How should health care providers deal with families with religious objections to withdrawing treatment? In this timely book, experts from a variety of perspectives and disciplines offer insight on these and other pressing questions, describing what the public discourse gets right and wrong, how policymakers might respond, and what potential conflicts may arise in the future. It should be read by academics, policymakers, and anyone else – patient or physician, secular or devout – interested in how US law interacts with health care and religion.

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Fetal Consequentialism and Maternal Mortality

Nadia Sawicki Leave a comment

By Nadia N. Sawicki

It is well known that maternal mortality rates in the United States are higher than in other countries in the developed world, and that many of these deaths are preventable. But a report published by NPR last week, just a few days before Mother’s Day, drew a direct link between these poor maternal outcomes and health care providers’ focus on fetal health. The report quotes Barbara Levy, vice president for health policy and advocacy at the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, who said, “We worry a lot about vulnerable little babies, [but] we don’t pay enough attention to those things that can be catastrophic for women.” According to the authors of the NPR report, “newborns in the slightest danger are whisked off to neonatal intensive care units … staffed by highly trained specialists prepared for the worst,” while new mothers are instead monitored by nurses and physicians “who expect things to be fine and are often unprepared when they aren’t.”

These patterns are consistent with what Prof. Jamie Abrams calls “fetal consequentialism” – the premise that the birth of a healthy child outweighs any harm to the birthing mother. The increase in U.S. maternal mortality rates highlighted in the NPR report is certainly a product of such fetal consequentialism. So is the practice of obstetric violence, described in my previous posts, where health care providers dismiss birthing mothers’ informed requests for minimal intervention during labor and delivery in an effort to reduce the risk of fetal harm, even when that risk is minimal. Fetal consequentialism is likely driven not only by providers’ judgments of the relative liability risks for harms to fetuses versus harms to mothers, but also by conservative societal trends (evidenced by increasing anti-abortion legislation) that preference fetal interests over maternal interests. Read More

Reproductive Health Under Assault

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

This new post by Aziza Ahmed appears on the Health Affairs Blog in a series stemming from the Fifth Annual Health Law Year in P/Review event held at Harvard Law School on Monday, January 23, 2017.

American political, social, and religious history has made abortion a deeply partisan issue. This despite the reality that many women (as well as trans and gender non-conforming individuals) from diverse racial, cultural, class, and religious backgrounds regularly access abortion-related services. The outcome of the 2016 elections has set into motion an expected but nonetheless deeply damaging anti-abortion agenda that is slowly taking form in the Trump administration’s early days — aided by the Republican majority House and Senate. These early moves signal that the new administration aims to roll back gains made toward reproductive justice in 2016.

The attack on abortion rights and, in turn, reproductive justice, by this administration is no surprise. The GOP Platform released during the elections makes many references to defunding or restricting abortion services. The document specifically attacks key victories for reproductive health including the 2016 Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt Supreme Court decision overturning key provisions of the 2013 Texas House Bill 2. The law required that doctors who provide abortion services must obtain admitting privileges at local hospitals no farther than 30 miles away from the clinic, and abortion providers comply with guidelines to become Ambulatory Surgical Centers. The Supreme Court found the regulations to be unconstitutional because they result in substantial obstacles in the path of women seeking pre-viability abortions — contrary to the claim made by the Texas Department of State Health Services that the laws make abortions safer. […]

Read the full post here.