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Justice Dept. Backs Off Its Demand for Abortion RecordsBy ERIC LICHTBLAU, NYTimes on the Web, March 10, 2004WASHINGTON, March 9 — The Justice Department is dropping its demand, at least for now, that six Planned Parenthood clinics around the country produce medical records on abortions, officials said Tuesday. The decision, applauded by privacy advocates and supporters of abortion rights, came in response to a decision on Friday by a federal judge in San Francisco, who found that the government's demand for the records was an undue intrusion on patients' rights. In her decision, Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton of United States District Court threw out the government's demand for the Planned Parenthood records of some 2,700 patients. Judge Hamilton also said she "strongly encouraged the government" to withdraw the subpoenas it had issued to Planned Parenthood for related medical records. In letters dated Monday, the Justice Department did just that and notified Planned Parenthood affiliates in New York, Pittsburgh, Washington, Los Angeles, San Diego and Kansas City, Mo., that "we will not move at this time" to pursue the subpoenaed records. But the department said it might still "renew our requests if necessary." The Justice Department sought the records as part of its defense of the new law that bans a procedure it calls partial-birth abortion. The law, enacted last year, makes it a crime to perform an abortion using a method known as intact dilation and extraction, but the law's opponents say the law's language is broad enough to ban other abortion procedures as well. Some doctors and health care providers who are suing to block the law have maintained that it would prevent them from conducting medically necessary procedures. Government lawyers say they need access to records — without identifying information on the patients — in order to test the validity of that claim. The Justice Department is still demanding abortion records from at least a half-dozen hospitals in New York and Philadelphia, among other places. The subpoenas came in a separate lawsuit brought in New York over the abortion restrictions. Two federal judges in that case have issued divergent opinions, with a judge in Chicago throwing out the subpoenas and a judge in New York saying that the government was entitled to see the records. In the San Francisco case, the Justice Department continues to believe that the subpoenaed records "are central to Planned Parenthood's claim that partial-birth abortion is medically necessary," but it decided to drop the subpoenas for now in light of the judge's order, the department said in a statement on Tuesday. Supporters of abortion rights called the decision bittersweet. "I am glad the department has decided to back off its subpoena for now," said Representative Louise M. Slaughter, Democrat of New York and co-chairwoman of the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus. "But it should never have attempted such a violation of women's medical records in the first place." Eve Gartner, senior staff lawyer for the Planned Parenthood Federation, said in an interview that the group was discouraged to see that the Justice Department had left open the possibility of renewing its demands. "These affiliates remain on notice that at any moment they could get a letter from the Justice Department demanding these records," Ms. Gartner said. "It's not a good feeling to have this cloud hanging over them." Planned Parenthood last month agreed to turn over to the government its redacted records on 17 cases from 2002 involving second-trimester abortions that resulted in a complication in the procedure. But the group maintains that the other records sought by the Justice Department are more extensive and irrelevant to the lawsuit. |
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