Indiana governor urged to reject abortion restrictions News
Indiana governor urged to reject abortion restrictions

[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].

THIS DAY @ LAW

Night of the Murdered Poets takes place in USSR

Soviet authorities under Josef Stalin executed a group of 13 Jewish intellectuals from the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, an organization dedicated to supporting the Soviet war effort against Nazi Germany, on August 12, 1952. The 13 stood accused of supporting the US and Zionism as well as trying to create an independent republic in Crimea, which all but one falsely confessed to under torture. Learn more about the Night of the Murdered Poets from the World Jewish Congress and Forward. Also read a history of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee from the Jewish Virtual Library.

Swiss banks agreed to compensate Holocaust victims for holding assets

On August 12, 1998, Swiss banks agreed to pay $1.25 billion to settle lawsuits brought by Holocaust survivors and their heirs. The plaintiffs had alleged that the banks had kept millions of dollars deposited by Holocaust victims before and during World War II. Read CNN's original report of the story.

City of Chicago founded

On August 12, 1833, the City of Chicago was founded. The city was later formally incorporated with a town charter on March 4, 1837.
Learn more about the history of Chicago's charter from the Encyclopedia of Chicago.

Former Japan PM convicted of accepting bribes

On August 12, 1983, the former Prime Minister of Japan, Tanaka Kakuei was convicted of accepting bribes while in office and sentenced to 4 years in jail. He came to be described as "the paragon of post war corruption" for taking money from the defense contractor Boeing in exchange for favorable contracts. Also on this day, Nikita Kruschev famously banged his shoe on the table during a heated argument before the United Nations General Assembly.