Reproductive rights Archives

Greenland women seek compensation over involuntary birth control

A group of 67 women from Greenland are seeking compensation from the Danish government over a campaign of involuntary birth control in the 1960s.

At least 4,500 women, some of them teenagers, were fitted with coils under a programme intended to limit birth rates among the indigenous population.

An inquiry is due to conclude in 2025, but the women, some of whom are in their 70s, want compensation now.

They are seeking 300,000 kroner (£34,880; $42,150) each.

Greenland, now a semi-sovereign territory of Denmark, was a Danish colony until 1953.

The scale of the campaign was exposed last year in a podcast published by Danish broadcaster DR.

Records from the national archived showed that, between 1966 and 1970 alone, intrauterine devices (IUDs) were fitted into the women, some as young as 13, without their knowledge or consent.

The government of Greenland estimates that, by the end of 1969, 35% of women in the territory who could potentially have borne children had been fitted with an IUD, according to DR.

A commission set up by the Danish and Greenlandic governments to investigate the programme is not due to deliver its findings until May 2025.

“We don’t want to wait for the results of the inquiry,” said psychologist Naja Lyberth, who initiated the compensation claim.

“We are getting older. The oldest of us, who had IUDs inserted in the 1960s, were born in the 1940s and are approaching 80. We want to act now.”

Ms Lyberth said that, in some cases, the devices fitted had been too big for the girls’ bodies, causing serious health complications or even infertility, while in others the women had been unaware of the devices until they were discovered recently by gynaecologists.

She accused the Danish government of the time of wanting to control the size of Greenland’s population in order to save money on welfare.

“It’s already 100% clear that the government has broken the law by violating our human rights and causing us serious harm,” she said.

Mads Pramming, the lawyer representing the women, sent a claim on their behalf to the office of Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen on Monday.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66990670

Biden administration takes abortion pill dispute to US Supreme Court

Mifepristone, the first medication in a medical abortion, is prepared for a patient at Alamo Women’s Clinic in Carbondale, Illinois, U.S., April 20, 2023. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein/File Photo Acquire Licensing RightsPresident Joe Biden’s administration took its battle to preserve broad access to the abortion pill mifepristone to the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday as it appealed a lower court’s ruling that would curb how the drug is delivered and distributed.

The Justice Department said it filed its appeal of an August decision by the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that would bar telemedicine prescriptions and shipments of mifepristone by mail. The drug’s manufacturer, Danco Laboratories, also said it filed its appeal on Friday.

The 5th Circuit’s decision is currently on hold pending the outcome of the administration’s appeal at the Supreme Court.

The Justice Department in its filing said that allowing the 5th Circuit’s restrictions to take effect would have “damaging consequences for women seeking lawful abortions and a healthcare system that relies on the availability of the drug under the current conditions of use.”

The case could put at risk the authority of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the federal agency that signs off on the safety of food products, drugs and medical devices. The FDA approved mifepristone in 2000.

In its filing, Danco’s attorney Jessica Ellsworth said the 5th Circuit upended the approved conditions for use of Danco’s drug, called Mifeprex, “at the request of a group of plaintiffs who do not prescribe or use the drug and whose real disagreement with FDA is that they oppose all forms of abortion.”

If the justices decide to take up the case, they could hear arguments in their next term, which begins in October, and issue a ruling by the end of June 2024.

The 5th Circuit’s decision partially sided with the anti-abortion groups and doctors who challenged mifepristone. It did not go as far as a prior decision by U.S. Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in Amarillo, Texas, that would have suspended FDA approval of mifepristone and effectively pulled it off the market.

In April, the Supreme Court granted emergency requests by the Justice Department and the pill’s manufacturer Danco Laboratories to put on hold Kacsmaryk’s order while litigation continued.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/legal/abortion-pill-manufacturer-takes-dispute-over-access-us-supreme-court-2023-09-08/

She Wasn’t Able to Get an Abortion. Now She’s a Mom. Soon She’ll Start 7th Grade.

Ashley in Clarksdale, Miss., Aug. 1, 2023. Lucy Garrett for TIME

Ashley just had a baby. She’s sitting on the couch in a relative’s apartment in Clarksdale, Miss., wearing camo-print leggings and fiddling with the plastic hospital bracelets still on her wrists. It’s August and pushing 90 degrees, which means the brown patterned curtains are drawn, the air conditioner is on high, and the room feels like a hiding place. Peanut, the baby boy she delivered two days earlier, is asleep in a car seat at her feet, dressed in a little blue outfit. Ashley is surrounded by family, but nobody is smiling. One relative silently eats lunch in the kitchen, her two siblings stare glumly at their phones, and her mother, Regina, watches from across the room. Ashley was discharged from the hospital only hours ago, but there are no baby presents or toys in the room, no visible diapers or ointments or bottles. Almost nobody knows that Peanut exists, because almost nobody knew that Ashley was pregnant. She is 13 years old. Soon she’ll start seventh grade.

In the fall of 2022, Ashley was raped by a stranger in the yard outside her home, her mother says. For weeks, she didn’t tell anybody what happened, not even her mom. But Regina knew something was wrong. Ashley used to love going outside to make dances for her TikTok, but suddenly she refused to leave her bedroom. When she turned 13 that November, she wasn’t in the mood to celebrate. “She just said, ‘It hurts,’” Regina remembers. “She was crying in her room. I asked her what was wrong, and she said she didn’t want to tell me.” (To protect the privacy of a juvenile rape survivor, TIME is using pseudonyms to refer to Ashley and Regina; Peanut is the baby’s nickname.)

The signs were obvious only in retrospect. Ashley started feeling sick to her stomach; Regina thought it was related to her diet. At one point, Regina even asked Ashley if she was pregnant, and Ashley said nothing. Regina hadn’t yet explained to her daughter how a baby is made, because she didn’t think Ashley was old enough to understand. “They need to be kids,” Regina says. She doesn’t think Ashley even realized that what happened to her could lead to a pregnancy.

On Jan. 11, Ashley began throwing up so much that Regina took her to the emergency room at Northwest Regional Medical Center in Clarksdale. When her bloodwork came back, the hospital called the police. One nurse came in and asked Ashley, “What have you been doing?” Regina recalls. That’s when they found out Ashley was pregnant. “I broke down,” Regina says.

Dr. Erica Balthrop at the Clarksdale Woman’s Clinic on Aug. 2. Lucy Garrett for TIME

Dr. Erica Balthrop was the ob-gyn on call that day. Balthrop is an assured, muscular woman with close-cropped cornrows and a tattoo of a feather running down her arm. She ordered an ultrasound, and determined Ashley was 10 or 11 weeks along. “It was surreal for her,” Balthrop recalls. “She just had no clue.” The doctor could not get Ashley to answer any questions, or to speak at all. “She would not open her mouth.” (Balthrop spoke about her patient’s medical history with Regina’s permission.)

At their second visit, about a week later, Regina tentatively asked Balthrop if there was any way to terminate Ashley’s pregnancy. Seven months earlier, Balthrop could have directed Ashley to abortion clinics in Memphis, 90 minutes north, or in Jackson, Miss., two and a half hours south. But today, Ashley lives in the heart of abortion-ban America. In 2018, Republican lawmakers in Mississippi enacted a ban on most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The law was blocked by a federal judge, who ruled that it violated the abortion protections guaranteed by Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court felt differently. In their June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion that had existed for nearly half a century. Within weeks, Mississippi and every state that borders it banned abortion in almost all circumstances.

Source : https://time.com/6303701/a-rape-in-mississippi

Taiwan women freeze their eggs as ‘insurance’ in hopes of law change

Seated with her legs stretched out on her living room floor, Vivian Tung scrunched her bare stomach to find a spot where she could inject Rekovelle, a hormonal medicine used to stimulate egg production.

The 33-year-old Taiwanese brand marketing director had to inject herself daily over the two-week process it took to freeze her eggs.

Tung injects herself with hormones after a regular check-up at the Shin Kong Wu Ho-Su Memorial Hospital in Taipei, Taiwan, June 12, 2023. REUTERS/Ann Wang

Tung, who is single, is one of a rising number of women in Taiwan opting to freeze their eggs to give them the option to have a child later in life, even though under current laws they cannot use the eggs unless they marry.

“It’s my insurance policy,” she said, explaining that many women in Taiwan are independent, career-focused and not looking to solely find a husband just to have children.

“My family is very supportive and respect my choice. When they hear that I buy insurance for myself, they also feel very good.”

Self-ruled Taiwan has a fertility rate of 0.89 children per woman, less than half the replacement level of 2.1 and one of the world’s lowest just behind South Korea and Hong Kong.

Single women in Taiwan can freeze their eggs, unlike in China where it is banned. But it is only legal to use the eggs in a heterosexual marriage, which excludes unmarried women and same-sex married couples.

Doctors in Taiwan said the restriction has contributed to only around 8% of women using their eggs after they have been frozen, compared with around 38% in the United States.

Law changes

Tung is hopeful that authorities in the democratic island could change regulations to allow unmarried women to have children in future.

Before her surgery, Tung had to visit the hospital every two to three days for blood tests to check her hormone levels to see how the eggs were developing, often at irregular times like 9 p.m. due to her work schedule.

The effort was definitely worth it, she said.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/taiwan-fertility/

US judge suspends approval of mifepristone in latest abortion setback

Used boxes of Mifepristone pills, the first drug used in a medical abortion, fill a trash at Alamo Women’s Clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S., January 11, 2023. REUTERS/Evleyn Hockstein

A U.S. judge in Texas on Friday suspended the two-decade-old approval of the abortion pill mifepristone while a legal challenge proceeds, dealing another setback to abortion rights in the United States.

Adding to the volatile legal landscape around abortion, a federal judge in Washington state on Friday issued a seemingly conflicting injunction that prevented federal regulators from altering access to the same abortion drug.

The 67-page ruling by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in Amarillo, Texas, will not take effect for one week, in order to give the Biden administration a chance to file an emergency appeal, which the U.S. Department of Justice said it will do.

Kacsmaryk’s ruling is a preliminary injunction that would essentially ban sales of mifepristone while the case by anti-abortion groups before him continues. The judge, who was appointed to the bench by Republican President Donald Trump, has not yet made a final ruling on the merits of the challenge.

However, in his ruling he found that the lawsuit is substantially likely to succeed. He said that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had ignored risks in approving the drug.

“The Court does not second-guess FDA’s decision-making lightly,” he wrote. “But here, FDA acquiesced on its legitimate safety concerns – in violation of its statutory duty – based on plainly unsound reasoning and studies that did not support its conclusions.”

The case was brought by four anti-abortion groups headed by the recently formed Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine and four anti-abortion doctors who sued the FDA in November. They contend the agency used an improper process when it approved mifepristone in 2000 and did not adequately consider the drug’s safety when used by girls under age 18 to terminate a pregnancy.

“By illegally approving dangerous chemical abortion drugs, the FDA put women and girls in harm’s way, and it’s high time the agency is held accountable for its reckless actions,” said Erik Baptist of the Alliance Defending Freedom, which filed the case.

‘EXTREME ANTI-CHOICE AGENDA’

The ruling will likely inflame the fraught U.S. politics of abortion, which have divided the country since last year’s Supreme Court ruling that overturned a women’s constitutional right to the procedure.

“Democrats will do everything in our power to fight back to ensure access to safe and legal abortion is protected, and voters will hold every last Republican accountable for an extreme anti-choice agenda,” said Jaime Harrison, the chair of the Democratic National Committee.

Since the Supreme Court ruled, 12 of the 50 states now ban abortion outright while many others prohibit it after a certain length of pregnancy, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights.

Mifepristone is part of a two-drug regimen, administered in combination with misprostol, for medication abortions in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. The drugs account for more than half of all abortions in the country.

Some abortion providers have said that if mifepristone is unavailable, they would switch to a misoprostol-only regimen for a medication abortion, which is not as effective. It is not yet clear how widely available it would be.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-judge-hands-anti-abortion-groups-partial-win-over-abortion-pill-2023-04-07/