Indiana GOP Drops Forced Ultrasound Requirement To Focus On Shutting Down Abortion Clinics

Last month, Indiana Republicans proposed a measure intended to shut down a Planned Parenthood clinic in the state. The original SB 371 legislation also contained a clause that would have required women taking the RU-486 abortion pill to undergo two invasive transvaginal probes — one before taking the pill, and one after. But ever since the transvaginal ultrasound provision first erupted into controversy, the state’s GOP has been working to scale it back, hoping to assuage public outrage and quietly shepard the rest of the anti-choice legislation’s passage into law.

At first, the Indiana Senate removed the bill’s second ultrasound requirement to ensure its passage. And now, a House committee has removed the ultrasound requirement altogether. According to an Associated Press report, “Indiana Right to Life president Mike Fichter says the group agreed with the decision to drop the ultrasound requirement because debate over it in the state Senate had taken focus away from its goal of tightening regulations on clinics that provide abortions.” Now that abortion opponents have conceded to public pressure on the invasive forced ultrasound measures, the rest of SB 371 will seem moderate in comparison. But the anti-choice legislation would still have far-reaching consequences for women’s reproductive rights in the state.

Indiana lawmakers are pursuing a popular right-wing strategy for limiting abortion access: Indirectly restricting abortion by imposing costly, unnecessary requirements on abortion clinics with the intention of forcing them to close their doors. SB 371 would force health clinics that prescribe the abortion pill to adhere to the same standards as surgical clinics, even though medication abortions are not actually surgical procedures. It’s a direct attack on a Planned Parenthood clinic that provides the RU-486 to patients seeking to terminate a pregnancy during the first trimester, since that clinic would likely not be able to comply with the new restrictions.

Women’s health advocates consider these type of abortion restrictions to be some of the most dangerous assaults to women’s health — because they can take effect fairly quickly, they effectively limit women’s abortion access, and they often fly under the radar without inspiring the same kind of outrage that other laws, like transvaginal ultrasound requirements, do. That’s exactly why Indiana Republicans are willing to sacrifice mandatory ultrasounds to focus on their real “goal.”

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FDA Forced To Ditch Graphic Cigarette Warning Labels In Wake Of Appellate Court Decision

In a victory for the tobacco industry, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Justice Department have decided to bow out of an ongoing legal battle with several of America’s biggest cigarette manufacturers over proposed regulations requiring all of their products to be conspicuously branded with graphic imagery and warnings about their adverse health consequences.

Mandating the labels — which include visceral depictions of tobacco’s carcinogenic effect on the lungs, throat, and mouth — was made possible under the auspices of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act of 2009. That landmark legislation put tobacco regulation under the FDA’s purview for the first time in American history and instructed the body to develop new cigarette labels with color graphics, prompting the FDA to propose the nine graphic warnings that have drawn tobacco distributors’ ire.

But a federal appellate court affirmed a lower court’s decision to strike down the proposed rule in March, claiming that its “graphic-image requirements are not the type of purely factual and uncontroversial disclosures that are reviewable under this less stringent standard” of 1st Amendment protections against compelled commercial speech — an argument heartily endorsed by the tobacco lobby:

Some of the nation’s largest tobacco companies, including R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., sued to block the mandate to include warnings on cigarette packs as part of the 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act that, for the first time, gave the federal government authority to regulate tobacco. The nine labels originally set to appear on store shelves last year would’ve represented the biggest change in cigarette packs in the U.S. in 25 years.

Tobacco companies increasingly rely on their packaging to build brand loyalty and grab consumers — one of the few advertising levers left to them after the government curbed their presence in magazines, billboards and TV. They had argued that the proposed warnings went beyond factual information into anti-smoking advocacy.

The government, however, argued the images were factual in conveying the dangers of tobacco, which is responsible for about 443,000 deaths in the U.S. a year.

The legal argument against the labeling requirements is certainly not implausible — in fact, that’s likely the reason that the federal government chose not to appeal to the Supreme Court. But it’s a standard of free speech that federal judges apply asymmetrically, as they don’t give doctors who provide abortions the same protections against government-compelled speech as they grant to the multibillion dollar tobacco industry.

Brand labeling has become Big Tobacco’s signature avenue for advertising to its consumer base, since federal law has prohibited television advertisements for tobacco since the 1970s, and additional restrictions were included in the more recent legislation signed by President Obama. Consequently, the FDA’s new labels could have been an effective method of giving consumers information about tobacco’s negative health effects — especially considering that studies have shown that pictures speak louder than words in anti-smoking campaigns.

While American smoking rates have plunged in the last several decades, low-income Americans — particularly women — who are particularly unable to afford the massive health care costs of smoking-related illness still use tobacco in high numbers. Until the FDA comes up with a labeling rule that can withstand judicial scrutiny, public health and anti-smoking advocates may have to rely on more parochial efforts, such as New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s (I) new initiative to crack down on public cigarette displays.

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Great Recession Forced All Americans To Cut Back On Their Health Care

Although the Great Recession has taken an outsized toll on African-Americans and Hispanics, new research suggests that the economic downturn has forced Americans across all racial groups to equally cut back on their medical services.

After researchers at the University of Maryland analyzed more than 54,000 U.S. adults’ health care use, they found that — despite their assumptions that the demographic groups struggling the most as the result of the Great Recession would also struggle the most to access health care — the declining economy impacted all Americans’ ability to get the care they need. During the recession, the average number of doctor visits and prescription drug refills dropped about the same amount for whites, African-Americans, and Latinos. Visits to the emergency room were also essentially unchanged across all groups.

Of course, that doesn’t mean Americans across all racial and economic groups have equal access to health services. There were significant racial disparities in medical care before the Great Recession hit — for example, while whites visited the doctor an average of about 7 times a year around 2005, the average rate was closer to 5.75 for blacks and 4.5 for Latinos during that time period. African-Americans were, and still remain, more likely to be hospitalized than other groups. Earlier reports from the Census Bureau have found that 40 percent of the Americans living in poverty did not visit a doctor in 2010, and confirmed that Hispanics were the least likely group to make a trip to the doctor’s office that year.

But, as the lead researchers for the new study point out, at least the growing economic inequality between whites and racial minorities during the recent recession hasn’t widened the gulf when it comes to health care. “Although minorities bore the brunt of the recession in terms of losses in employment, income and insurance, our findings suggest that trends in [medical] use patterns were similar across race and ethnicity,” the study concludes.

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