Texas rule requiring burial or cremation of fetal tissue shames women, suit says

A women’s rights group has filed a lawsuit in an attempt to block a new Texas rule that requires fetal remains to be cremated or buried.

Accusing the state of a politically-motivated ploy to make it harder for women to have abortions, the Center for Reproductive Rights launched the legal action on Monday, one week before the regulation is set to take effect on 19 December.

The lawsuit against the Texas department of state health services (DSHS), filed in federal court in Austin, alleges that the regulation has no medical benefits, will pose practical burdens by increasing the cost of healthcare services and is an attempt to stigmatise abortion and heap shame on women seeking the procedure.

Whole Woman’s Health, an abortion provider, is the lead plaintiff in the suit. It claims that the new regulation “burdens women seeking pregnancy-related medical care. It imposes a funeral ritual on women who have a miscarriage management procedure, ectopic pregnancy surgery, or an abortion.

“Further, it threatens women’s health and safety by providing no safe harbor for sending tissue to pathology or crime labs. It also forces healthcare providers to work with an extremely limited number of third-party vendors for burial or scattering ashes, threatening abortion clinics’ provision of care and their long-term ability to remain open, as well as cost increases for women seeking pregnancy-related medical care.”

Current Texas regulations on disposal by healthcare facilities do not generally distinguish between fetal remains and other kinds of human materials that would typically be disposed of in a sanitary landfill. The new rule changes that, creating a category for “fetal tissue” and ordering it to be buried or cremated regardless of how far along the pregnancy is. Miscarriages or abortions that happen at home are exempt and birth or death certificates are not required to be issued.

The plan, strongly promoted by Texas’ Republican governor Greg Abbott, was publicly announced last July, four days after the supreme court struck down key parts of an onerous 2013 abortion law that prompted a drastic drop in the number of clinics in Texas. The court found that the law, which mandated that clinics have standards akin to surgical centres, caused an undue burden on women seeking an abortion and did not offer sufficient medical benefits. Abbott, though, has vowed to continue efforts to restrict abortion.

“I believe it is imperative to establish higher standards that reflect our respect for the sanctity of life. This is why Texas will require clinics and hospitals to bury or cremate human and fetal remains,” Abbott wrote in July in a fundraising email to supporters reported by the Texas Tribune. He said the proposal would “help make Texas the strongest pro-life state in the nation”.

According to the DSHS, the rule will benefit public health and safety “by ensuring that the disposition methods specified in the rules continue to be limited to methods that prevent the spread of disease” and by “protecting the dignity of the unborn”. Texas’s Republican-dominated legislature is expected to formally enshrine the regulation in state law during the 2017 session, which starts in January.

Texas governor Greg Abbott has said the proposal would ‘help make Texas the strongest pro-life state in the nation’. Photograph: Mike Stone/Reuters

“These regulations are an insult to Texas women, the rule of law and the US supreme court, which declared less than six months ago that medically unnecessary restrictions on abortion access are unconstitutional,” Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement. “These insidious regulations are a new low in Texas’ long history of denying women the respect that they deserve to make their own decision about their lives and their healthcare.”

The question of how to handle fetal remains became a rallying point for anti-abortion activists after an organisation released a video in 2015 that falsely appeared to show employees at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Houston illegally selling fetal tissue.

Mike Pence, the Indiana governor and now vice-president-elect, signed a restrictive abortion law in March this year that included a fetal remains provision similar to Texas’s plans. It was stopped by a court in June shortly before it was scheduled to take effect.

Another law in Louisiana is on hold because of an ongoing legal challenge.

Texas rule requiring burial or cremation of fetal tissue shames women, suit says

Scotland’s offer to give abortions to Northern Irish women shames Stormont | Patrick Corrigan

Scotland and Northern Ireland are separated by just a few short miles of sea. But when it comes to access to abortion, they are divided by more than 150 years of history. While Scots women are able to access abortions on the same basis as their counterparts in England and Wales, Northern Irish women still face a near-total ban on the termination of pregnancy.

In 2014-15, only 16 women were able to have lawful abortions in Northern Ireland. By contrast, 833 Ulster women travelled to England or Wales and paid for terminations at private clinics. And despite being full and equal taxpayers, Northern Ireland-resident women have been barred from accessing free abortions in NHS hospitals in England, Wales and Scotland.

It was into this breach that Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, stepped last week when she told the Scottish parliament that she would explore the possibility of women and girls from Northern Ireland being able to access terminations through NHS Scotland. Her intervention has enraged the deeply conservative Democratic Unionist party (DUP), Northern Ireland’s largest party of government, but been welcomed by pro-choice and human rights campaigners in the region.

While healthcare has been a devolved matter in Scotland since the creation of the Scottish parliament, it was only in May this year that abortion law was handed over to Holyrood. It is against this backdrop that Sturgeon’s intervention has demonstrated leadership on behalf of Northern Irish women sorely lacking both at Stormont and Westminster. There is near unanimous support in the Holyrood parliament for keeping abortion provision for Scotland in line with the 1967 Abortion Act. The picture couldn’t be more different across the water.

As recently as February this year, the Northern Ireland assembly voted to keep the region’s abortion law as it is, refusing to legislate for abortion even in cases of rape, incest, or where the foetus has no chance of survival outside the womb. This was despite a Belfast high court finding, just two months previously, that Northern Ireland law breaches the European convention on human rights.

Meanwhile, the UK health secretary Jeremy Hunt has determined that the NHS in England must operate a residence-based system so that women who live in Northern Ireland are barred from accessing NHS abortion services in England, despite being UK citizens. This position is currently the subject of a legal challenge at the UK supreme court taken by a Northern Ireland teenager and her mother. They want women and girls from Northern Ireland to receive free abortions on the NHS in England.

The young woman at the centre of the case was 15 in 2012 when she and her mother travelled from Northern Ireland to Manchester and were asked to pay for a private termination. It is estimated that, with private clinic charges as well as the cost of travel and accommodation, a Northern Ireland woman needs to find anything between £400 and £2,000 to obtain a lawful abortion across the water in Britain – NHS care available for free to women in every other part of the UK.

Northern Ireland’s politicians are being left behind by the people

Stephen Cragg, who is acting as QC for the mother and daughter, told the supreme court at a hearing earlier this month that women and girls like his client are “second-class citizens” who “live in the UK, but – unlike all other women and girls in the UK – they are at risk of the most serious criminal penalty if they procure an abortion in their own area”.

In Northern Ireland, any woman or girl who has an abortion deemed unlawful is liable for prosecution and could face a sentence of up to life imprisonment. Earlier this year a woman who had induced her own miscarriage by taking abortion pills obtained over the internet was found guilty under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act and given a three-month suspended sentence. There are a number of other similar cases poised to come before the courts in Northern Ireland, including the prosecution of a mother who obtained the pills on behalf of her pregnant teenage daughter.

Despite all this, a majority of Northern Ireland’s politicians have set their face against reform. Comfortable in their self-designation as “pro-life”, they appear to be immune to criticism – even from the UN, whose human rights committee recently ruled that this part of the UK’s laws prohibiting and criminalising abortion constitute a human rights violation.

But, increasingly, Northern Ireland’s politicians are being left behind by the people. Independent polling published recently by Amnesty International showed that seven in 10 people want to see Northern Ireland’s harsh abortion laws changed, while more than half want to see abortion decriminalised altogether. The tens of thousands of people who are calling for abortion to be decriminalised also speak to that shift.

Sturgeon’s offer of possible help to Northern Irish women and girls should be a matter of deep embarrassment to ministers in Northern Ireland. Theresa May should match Sturgeon’s offer to stand up for Northern Irish women abandoned by their own politicians. When it comes to the human right to healthcare, lines on a map should be no barrier.

Scotland’s offer to give abortions to Northern Irish women shames Stormont | Patrick Corrigan

WHO names and shames United kingdom cities breaching protected air pollution levels

British towns and cities have been named and shamed by the World Health Organisation for breaching safety amounts for air pollution.

Nine urban locations in the Uk have been named by the international well being entire body for breaching protected health ranges of air high quality.

WHO said that across the planet most cities that measure outdoor air pollution are failing to meet its guidance for protected levels and are putting residents at danger of respiratory disease and other well being issues. Total, only twelve% of the people residing in cities reporting on air quality reside in areas which comply with WHO’s security ranges.

A spokesman stated that it appears that air pollution is “receiving worse”.
WHO’s air high quality database monitors one,600 areas close to the globe, which includes 36 in Britain.

Earlier this 12 months it estimated that outdoor air pollution was responsible for the deaths of three.7 million folks globally for the duration of 2012. Air pollution is linked with deaths from heart disease and stroke, as nicely as respiratory illnesses and cancers, a spokesman mentioned.

One way to measure air good quality is to asses the amounts of a sort of pollution recognized as particulate matter (PMs).

WHO sets out a risk-free yearly typical degree for PMs and its most current data demonstrates that nine British towns and cities breached these restrict set for particles acknowledged as PM10. These contain Birmingham, Chesterfield, Leeds, London, Nottingham, Sheffield, Southampton, Stoke-on-Trent and Thurrock.

Nevertheless, of the British towns measured, not all supplied information for the amounts of PM10 including Manchester, Bournemouth and Northampton.

Cities and towns in other parts of the world such as China, Pakistan, and India had considerably larger levels of pollution.

“Too a lot of urban centres nowadays are so enveloped in dirty air that their skylines are invisible,” stated Dr Flavia Bustreo, WHO’s assistant director-basic for family, children and women’s wellness. “Not remarkably, this air is harmful to breathe. So a expanding number of cities and communities globally are striving to much better meet the needs of their residents – in distinct children and the elderly.”

Dr Carlos Dora, coordinator for interventions for healthier environments at WHO’s Department of Public Well being, Environmental and Social Determinants of Health, additional: “We are not able to acquire clean air in a bottle, but cities can adopt measures that will clean the air and save the lives of their people.”

Lately English wellness officials called on regional authorities to do more to shield men and women from damaging air pollution. Prolonged-phrase publicity to air pollution led to close to 25,000 deaths in England in 2010, Public Well being England (PHE) explained.

PHE said that air top quality has improved “considerably” in the United kingdom in latest decades due to new, cleaner technologies and tighter environmental legislation. But it mentioned that local action can be taken to lessen the emissions of these guy-created particles and people’s publicity to air pollution.

WHO names and shames United kingdom cities breaching protected air pollution levels