News,

The RU-486 abortion drug will be tested in Italy for the first time within a few weeks. The trials will take place at the Sant'Anna hospital in Turin, which already carries out the highest number of abortions in the country. [FT Information via Northern Light, 25 September ] A judge in Ohio who sent a pregnant woman to prison in order to prevent her from having an abortion has been suspended from practising law for six months. The supreme court of Ohio took the action after hearing that Patricia Cleary, who was a common pleas judge at the time of the case, violated court rules by sentencing Yuriko Kawaguchi, who had been convicted of using fake credit cards, to six months in prison to save the life of her unborn child. The woman gave birth to her child in early 1999. [NewsNet5, via Yahoo! News, 19 September ] The US House of Representatives yesterday rejected an amendment which would have allowed women deployed in American defence facilities overseas to obtain abortions. The amendment was defeated by 217 votes to 199 during consideration of a 343 billion-dollar defence spending bill. [AP, via Yahoo! News, 25 September ] It has been reported that the government of Manitoba, Canada, is looking to expand abortion services in the province. The Canadian federal health minister had threatened to penalise Manitoba and other provinces for their failure to fund abortions in private clinics, but Manitoba's provincial government continues to resist such a policy. Terry Goertzen of the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority revealed that the plan was instead to develop abortion services in a "non-profit, community-based setting". [LifeSite, 25 September ] A legal battle is being fought in the United States over who has control over a research facility's human embryonic stem cell lines. The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation is fighting attempts by Geron Corporation, a company based in California, to use the foundation's cell lines, each of which are descended from a human embryo who was killed. Geron financed much of the early research on the cell lines and is now seeking exclusive rights to any research products developed using them. [AP, via Boston Globe, 25 September ]