[JURIST] Indiana activists on Monday delivered a petition [text] to the Indiana statehouse urging Governor Mike Pence [official profile] to not sign HB 1337 [text], which they claim places overly burdensome restrictions on abortions. The bill requires practitioners to get informed consent by telling pregnant women considering abortion about the availability of perinatal hospice care and the gender of the unborn child and requiring abortion seeking women to have an ultrasound and hear the fetal heartbeat at least 18 hours before the procedure. It also prohibits doctors from performing abortions on women who are seeking the procedure solely due to the race, national origin, ancestry, or sex of the fetus or based on the possibility that the child will be born with a disability. Those that intentionally violate this law will face sanctions for wrongful death. The petition asserts that the bill is coercive, demeaning, restricts access to abortion, is judgmental, and will create discord between doctors and patients. The governor could choose to veto or sign the bill or could allow it to become law by taking no action within seven days of it being presented to him.

Abortion access and reproductive healthcare [JURIST backgrounder] remain contentious issues worldwide. Last week Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai Koroma [official website] again blocked a bill [JURIST report] that would have legalized abortion in the country. The High Court of Justice in Northern Ireland [official website] in November ruled [judgment] that Northern Ireland’s abortion laws, which only allow abortion when the mother faces the risk of death or serious injury, are a violation of human rights [JURIST report]. El Salvador’s complete ban on abortion [text, PDF, in Spanish] negatively affects [JURIST report] not only women and girls, but also their families, according to an Amnesty International report [press release] released the same month. A Dominican court in December blocked [JURIST report] a new law that would have decriminalized abortion if a pregnant woman’s life was at risk, thus reinstating a total ban on abortion within the country. A judge for the US District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana [official website] ruled [opinion, PDF] in January that part of an abortion law requiring hospital admitting privileges for doctors who provide abortions is unconstitutional [JURIST report].