INDIANAPOLIS — All-Options Pregnancy Resource Center and a coalition of health care providers are challenging an Indiana law on requiring health care providers to inform patients about “reversing” a medication abortion.
Republican lawmakers pushed the bill, despite objections that it would force doctors to provide dubious information to their patients. Supporters say the requirement would ensure that a woman can halt a medication-induced abortion if she changes her mind after taking the first of the two drugs used in the procedure and takes another drug instead.
Opponents say there is no evidence an abortion can be stopped after the patient has taken the first medication.
"Every day we help Hoosiers overcome barriers to find the abortion care they need,” said Parker Dockray, executive director of All-Options. “Indiana needs more access and compassion, not more restrictions. HB 1577 is a step in the wrong direction and we're proud to be challenging it along with our partners."
The lawsuit also challenges a 2021 ban on patients getting medication abortion through telemedicine.
The law is scheduled to take effect in July.
Six states already have similar requirements in place, while such laws in North Dakota, Oklahoma and Tennessee have been blocked by legal challenges, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights.
Other legal challenges in Indiana pertaining to abortions include:
- Patients and health care providers are challenging Indiana’s restriction for health care providers to dispose of embryonic and fetal tissue from miscarriage and abortion patients like they would a deceased person – either through interment or cremation.
- All-Options, Whole Woman’s Health Alliance, and other health care providers are challenging a host of abortion restrictions, including (1) Targeted Regulation of Abortion Provider (TRAP) laws; (2) laws it claims deny abortion patients the benefits of scientific progress; (3) alleged biased counseling and waiting-period laws; and (4) laws that criminalize abortion care. Trial was held in that challenge in March 2021.
- An individual health care provider is challenging a law that would have banned the standard method for abortion care starting in the earliest weeks of the second trimester. A federal district court blocked that ban in 2019.
- Planned Parenthood Great Northwest, Hawai‘i, Alaska, Indiana, Kentucky (PPGNHAIK) is challenging a law providing that even if a court exempts a minor from Indiana’s parental consent requirement because it determines the minor is mature, a parent must still be notified of the minor’s abortion - thus allowing a practical veto of the minor’ decision. A federal district court blocked that requirement in 2017. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has twice affirmed the injunction, and the State has twice petitioned the Supreme Court to review the case. An injunction blocking the law remains in effect.
- PPGNHAIK is also challenging reporting requirements that single out abortion providers, a restriction that has been blocked.
