Alaska Supreme Court rejects parental consent requirement for under-18 abortions News
Alaska Supreme Court rejects parental consent requirement for under-18 abortions

In a 4-1 opinion on Friday, the Alaska Supreme Court [official website] ruled [opinion, PDF] that the state’s parental “notification law” requiring doctors to inform the parents of minors seeking an abortion is unconstitutional, and cannot be enforced. The Court stated that “we are not concerned with whether abortion is right, wrong, moral, or immoral, or with whether abortions should be available to minors without restriction. We are concerned only with whether, given its stated underlying justifications, the current Notification Law complies with the Alaska Constitution’s equal protection guarantee — and it does not.” Alaska’s parental notification law applies to un-emancipated, unmarried minors, and includes specific requirements for parental notification, a 48-hour mandatory waiting period between parental notification and the termination of a minor’s pregnancy, and criminal and civil penalties for any physician who fails to comply with the notification requirements in terminating a minor’s pregnancy.

Abortion in general continues to be a highly controversial subject in the US. Earlier this month a US district judge issued a preliminary injunction [JURIST report] against a law intended to cut state funding to clinics administering abortions. That same week a federal judge placed an injunction [JURIST report] on an Indiana law that would have banned women from seeking abortion procedures when they are based on race, sex, or the potential for or actual diagnosis of a disability in the fetus. Recently the US Supreme Court ruled [opinion, PDF] 5-3 in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt [SCOTUSblog materials] that a Texas law [HB2 text] imposing certain requirements on abortion clinics and doctors creates an undue burden on access to abortion, and is therefore unconstitutional [JURIST report]. A collection of Texas abortion providers challenged provisions of HB2 requiring doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a local hospital and requiring abortion clinics to conform to state standards for ambulatory surgical centers on the grounds that such requirements violated the Fourteenth Amendment as interpreted by the Court in Planned Parenthood v. Casey [text]. The Indiana statute contained a similar “admitting privilege” provision.

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.