Would End Information Option : Bowen Announces Tough New Anti-Abortion Rules

Secretary of Health and Human Services Otis R. Bowen announced tough new anti-abortion regulations Saturday that would block all federally funded family-planning clinics from providing any information about abortion to pregnant women.

The regulations are designed to carry out President Reagan’s pledge to expunge all abortion information and referrals from the $142.5-million-a-year Family Planning Program. They also would require an organization that runs a family-planning clinic with federal funds, but carries out abortion activities with its own funds, to keep the two functions apart, with separate offices, phone numbers and medical and financial records.

“Abortion has no place in the . . . Family Planning Program,” Bowen said after sending the proposed regulations to the Federal Register for publication Tuesday. There will be a 60-day period for public comment before final regulations are published.

Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee, praised the new regulations. “If these rules stick, they’d dispel much of the controversy surrounding the program,” he said.

But Scott Swirling, executive director of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Assn., said that if the regulations are made final without change, his organization likely will seek court action to block them because he said they deny information to pregnant women on all of the medical options available to them.

Jody Frisch of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America said: “It’s medically unethical not to inform a woman of all her options.”

Under the Family Planning Act of 1970, the government makes grants to hospitals, state and local health agencies and private groups to provide contraceptives and family planning services and advice.

The law forbids abortion as a method of family planning under the program and thus bars the use of federal funds to perform or advocate abortions. But it does not bar a group that gets federal funds from using its own non-federal funds to perform or advocate abortions outside the federal program.

Must Provide List

Existing rules require that when a woman who is unintentionally pregnant seeks advice from a federally funded clinic on how to handle the pregnancy, it must inform her that abortion, keeping the baby or putting the baby up for adoption all are options. The clinic must provide her with a list of non-federally funded abortion clinics, if she requests.

Abortion foes have complained that the rule requiring a list of options and outside abortion clinics has the effect of promoting abortion and should be rescinded.