INDIANAPOLIS (AP) -
A federal judge has struck down an Indiana law that aimed to require reports
from medical providers to the state if they treat women for complications
arising from abortions.
U.S. District Judge
Richard Young’s ruling Wednesday that the law was unconstitutional came two
years after Young granted a preliminary injunction blocking the law from
taking effect following its 2018 passage.
Young sided with
Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky in its challenge to the law,
which lists 26 physical or psychological conditions that could trigger the
reporting requirement for doctors or clinics. The law made failure to do so
a misdemeanor punishable by up to 180 days in jail and a $1,000 fine.
Young ruled that
the law was “unconstitutionally vague,” writing that it gave doctors no
clear guidance on questions such as how long after an abortion they would
need to report a woman’s depression or trouble with a later pregnancy.
“The statute simply
lacks any standard to guide physicians in determining whether a condition
qualifies as an abortion complication for purposes of reporting,” Young
wrote. “The indeterminacy of the statute’s requirements denies fair notice
to physicians and invites arbitrary enforcement by prosecutors.”
The state attorney
general’s office defended the law, telling Young that the reporting
requirement “serves the public interest by collecting comprehensive data on
the complications that may result from abortion and the frequency of those
complications.”
Republican Attorney
General Curtis Hill said in a statement Thursday that his office would
“continue defending Indiana’s commonsense laws regulating the abortion
industry.”
Hannah Brass Greer,
chief legal counsel for Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, said the
reporting requirement “has no basis in science and medicine.”
“The reporting
requirements set by this law are another attempt by Indiana politicians to
shame and stigmatize people seeking abortion services and to spread the myth
that abortion is dangerous,” she said in a statement.
Young upheld
another provision in the 2018 law that requires annual inspections of
abortion clinics.
Planned Parenthood
argued that the law would treat abortion clinics unfairly because hospitals
and surgery centers would not face the same requirement.
But Young cited the
state’s argument that such annual inspections might have uncovered
misconduct earlier by Dr. Ulrich Klopfer, who operated abortion clinics in
Fort Wayne, Gary and South Bend before his medical license was revoked in
2015. After Klopfer died last year, authorities found more than 2,400
preserved sets of fetal remains at his suburban Chicago properties.
Young ruled that
Planned Parenthood’s equal protection rights weren’t violated because “the
state has offered a rational reason for the decision to subject abortion
clinics to stricter inspection requirements.”
The complications
reporting requirement is just the latest abortion restriction passed by the
Republican-led Legislature to get struck down in recent years.
A federal judge
last year blocked the state’s ban on a common second-trimester abortion
procedure that the legislation called “dismemberment abortion.”
The U.S. Supreme
Court last year also rejected Indiana’s appeal of a lower court ruling that
blocked the state’s ban on abortion based on gender, race or disability.
However, it upheld a portion of the 2016 law signed by then-Gov. Mike Pence
requiring the burial or cremation of fetal remains after an abortion.
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