Tag: reproductive laws

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Birth Control Mandate Survives States Lawsuit

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Seven U.S. states lost their federal court bid to block a government mandate requiring religious organizations to offer their employees insurance coverage for birth-control.

U.S. District Judge Warren K. Urbom in Lincoln, Nebraska, ruled yesterday that Catholic schools, organizations and individuals cited by the states lack standing to challenge the rule.

Even if they did, the judge said, the contraceptive requirements are “not being forced against non-exempted religious organizations, and the rule is currently undergoing a process of amendment to accommodate these organizations,” Urbom wrote. The states that sued “face no direct and immediate harm, and one can only speculate whether the plaintiffs will ever feel any effects from the rule,” he said.

Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning filed the complaint in February, claiming that the requirement violates free exercise of religion and freedom of speech rights. Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas joined the case.

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Three Men Want to Know How Their Frozen Sperm Was Destroyed

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Three men who claim their sperm was destroyed while it was being stored by Northwestern Memorial Hospital and the Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation filed an emergency motion today to protect records and to inspect the hospitals’ cryopreservation system.

The men had their sperm frozen because they suffer from illnesses or were facing medical treatment that could make them infertile, lawyers for Corboy & Demetrio said today in a press release.
In one case, a 33-year-old suffered from leukemia and was told radical chemotherapy treatment would likely make him sterile. In a second case, a 26-year-old who suffers from an illness that could render him sterile preserved his sperm because he planned to one day become a husband and a father, according to the release.

The third man, 48, preserved his sperm because he also suffers from a condition that could make him sterile.

On April 21 and 22 — a Saturday and a Sunday — a cryogenic storage tank used for long-term storage of sperm samples malfunctioned and a round-the-clock alarm system attached to the unit failed to alert technicians, according to a press release from the Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation. The press release said the information in it is attributable to Dr. Phillip Roemer, the chief medical officer of the Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation.

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Court To Rule If Sperm Donor Can Renege

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Who actually owns sperm donated to a sperm bank – the donor or the woman who paid for the sperm? Can a donor decide to change his mind after receiving payment for his donation? And what is more important, a donor’s right to refuse to be a father against his will, or a women’s right to have children who are biological siblings? The High Court of Justice will have to rule on these complex and sensitive questions in a petition that might affect the lives of thousands of women who use Israeli sperm banks to fulfill their wish to be mothers.

Four sperm vials – enough for eight fertilization treatments – are at the center of a judicial conflict between the donor who wishes to have his sperm donations scrapped and the recipient who purchased the vials and wishes to use them to have several children from the same father. Surprising as it may sound, there are no legal guidelines regarding sperm donations, and the scenario of the donor reneging is not dealt with in forms filled out by the donor and the recipient, nor in the directives of the Health Ministry.

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Woman Sues FDA for Right to Select Sperm Donor, Bypass Sperm Bank

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A California woman pursuing artificial insemination is suing the federal government for the right to choose how she’ll get the sperm.

The unusual case was filed Monday in U.S. District Court. On the heels of the Supreme Court decision upholding the federal health care overhaul, the plaintiff in this case is challenging another area of federal health care regulation.
At issue are Food and Drug Administration rules that set standards for sperm banks — like requiring tests for communicable diseases. But the woman in the California suit doesn’t want to go through a standard sperm bank or other clinic. The anonymous plaintiff instead, according to the suit, wants to use the sperm of someone she knows — at no cost — without going through all the federal regulatory rigmarole.

She and her lawyers call the FDA rules an unconstitutional violation of her rights — that is, her right to start a family with whomever she wants.

“When you are regulating private decisions between two individuals in a non-commercial context that have to do with something so intimate and personal as whether they want to have a child together, then the FDA regulations should not apply,” Amber Abbasi , attorney in the case, told FoxNews.com.

Abbasi’s group Cause of Action filed the suit on the California woman’s behalf.

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North Carolina Legislature Votes to Defund Planned Parenthood

ASRM News and Research

The Republican-controlled General Assembly of North Carolina voted to defund Planned Parenthood late Monday night. An estimated $200,000 will be stripped from the state’s two Planned Parenthood Affiliates after the General Assembly voted to override Governor Beverly Purdue’s veto of the annual budget.

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Forced to Abort After 7 months of Pregnancy; the US Raises Concerns on China’s Abortion Policy, But Is it Enough?

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China’s one child policy came into force in 1980 and restricted most families in China from having more than one child as a means of controlling the population.

The Chinese government’s justification for the policy lies in their assertion that it has prevented an additional 400 million births from occurring in the already overpopulated country of 1.3 billion people.

Local authorities pursue birth quotas set by Beijing by imposing abortions and sterilizations. The number of abortions has increased from less than 5 million abortions (before 1979) to 8.7 million (in 1981) – a year after the one-child policy was launched, peaking at 14.4 million (in 1983).

One recent imposed abortion flying around cyberspace is the case of Feng Jianmei. On June 2, Feng Jianmei, 27, was beaten by three Chinese officials, held down with a pillow over her head, and then injected with lethal chemicals to the belly to abort her unborn child. The dead baby was evacuated 2 days later after intense pain to the mother. Her baby was already seven months in utero.

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Pfizer Paid $896 Million in Prempro Settlements

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Pfizer Inc. (PFE), the world’s largest drugmaker, said in a securities filing that it has paid $896 million to resolve about 60 percent of the cases alleging its menopause drugs caused cancer in women.

Pfizer has now settled about 6,000 lawsuits that claim Prempro and other hormone-replacement drugs caused breast cancer, and it has set aside an additional $330 million to resolve the remaining 4,000 suits, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The reserve means New York-based Pfizer has committed more than $1.2 billion to resolving claims that its Wyeth and Pharmacia & Upjohn units failed to properly warn women about the menopause drugs’ health risk. Based on the May 10 filing, the company is paying an average of about $150,000 a case.

“It’s good for the company not to let this litigation linger,” Les Funtleyder, a New York-based fund manager at Miller Tabak & Co. in New York who holds Pfizer shares, said yesterday in a phone interview. “Resolving these cases gives investors one less thing to worry about.”
More than 6 million women took Prempro and related menopause drugs to treat symptoms including hot flashes and mood swings before a 2002 study highlighted their links to cancer. Wyeth’s sales of the medicines, which are still on the market, exceeded $2 billion before the release of the Women’s Health Initiative, a study sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.

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France: donor anonymity holds firm in court case

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A French court has effectively reaffirmed the country’s policy of gamete donor anonymity by rejecting a donor-conceived woman’s demand for information on her biological father.

The woman requested that a message be passed on to the man asking whether he would accept to be identified. She was also seeking disclosure of non-identifying information – medical history, reasons for donation, number of children conceived from the sample – in the event of the man’s refusal of her request.

But even though the woman, who has requested anonymity, was not asking for direct identification, the tribunal in Montreuil, on the outskirts of Paris, still threw out her request on the grounds that information given to clinics by gamete donors is protected as secret under French law.

The woman, herself a lawyer, had invoked Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects the right to private and family life and in some readings confers a right to access information essential to personal identity.

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Healthcare and reproductive rights divide U.S. and Canada

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NEW YORK, June 13 (TrustLaw) – On one side of the border, a woman can see a doctor for free and is guaranteed paid maternity leave. On the other, most women do not qualify for free healthcare and one in five under 65 does not have medical insurance.

These differences and others make Canada the best country among the world’s wealthiest nations to be a woman and keep the United States out of the top five, according to a poll of experts released on Wednesday by TrustLaw, a legal news service run by Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The United States ranked sixth among the 19 countries in the Group of 20 economies, excluding the European Union economic grouping, in the global survey of 370 recognised gender specialists.

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