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Recent Developments in Abortion Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 April 2021

Reed Boland
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Extract

This is the first in a projected series of periodic reports on international legal developments relating to reproductive health. It follows an introductory essay on abortion law developments in the industrialized world, which appeared in the Winter 1990 issue of Law, Medicine & Health Care. The major focus of this report is again abortion, the reproductive health issue with the highest international legal profile. Like its predecessor, it discusses the consequences of the withering away of Communism in Eastern Europe—in this case Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, and Poland—as well as the effects of major liberalization of abortion law in Belgium and Canada and the approval by France of use of the abortion-inducing drug RU-486.

Type
International Reproductive Policy
Information
Law, Medicine and Healthcare , Volume 19 , Issue 3-4 , Fall Winter 1991 , pp. 267 - 277
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 1991

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References

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Revue française de droit administratif, 208 (1991). The plaintiffs in these cases also made the following arguments, all of which were rejected by the State Council: a) that the Minister of Health had no authority to regulate RU-486 under the Code of Public Health; b) that the person who actually signed the order approving RU-486 had not been properly delegated to do so by the Minister of Health; c) that the Minister of Health was required to submit proposed regulations on RU-486 to national councils of physicians and pharmacists; d) that the timing of the order approving RU-486 was irregular; e) that instructions on the use of RU-486 were not sufficiently precise to preclude misuse of the drug; f) that regulations on the distribution of RU-486 violated legal provisions prohibiting the offering or sale of substances that can provoke abortion; and g) that instructions calling for women using RU-486 to be informed that, if this method of abortion fails, they run the risk of giving birth to a deformed fetus should they carry the pregnancy to term, violated legal provisions prohibiting “propaganda” in favor of abortion.Google Scholar
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