“Greetings Ms. Roe. I’m Dr. Smith. I understand you are considering exercising your Constitutional right to control your reproductive organs for reasons having to do with your health or your ability to bear and raise a child or something. Now, sure, you could terminate your pregnancy.
But, before you make your decision, the State of Indiana, in its wisdom, requires me to tell you that if you go through with the abortion, your sweet, dear little baby will likely be SCREAMING IN AGONY throughout the procedure. And it’s all so needless, you dear, ignorant, promiscuous woman. Did you know they have something called “adoption” now? Yup, if you’re too cheap to raise your precious child yourself, other people will do it for you. But, wait, there’s more! If you get an abortion, YOU COULD DIE!
So, now that you have all the facts, what’s it going to be?”
It’s that time of year again. The legislature is in session, and, once again, Senator Miller has introduced a bill proposing to mandate what information a physician must give his or her patient before the woman is entitled to choose to have an abortion.
SB 90 requires a physician to tell the patient at least 18 hours before the procedure that there is differing medical evidence concerning when a fetus feels pain, that adoption alternatives are available, that there are physical risks to abortion, and “that an embryo formed by the fertilization of a human ovum by a human sperm immediately begins to divide and grow as human physical life.”
Once again, there is no concern about advising a woman about the dangers of pregnancy, just the dangers of abortion. It is an effort to put the government’s thumb on the scales of the woman’s decision making. And, once again, it’s fairly presumptuous of the General Assembly to purport to determine for the rest of us when human life begins. Is life possessed of humanity simply by virtue of having the right number of chromosomes? I think there is more to it than that; and, whether I’m right or wrong, I’d thank the good folks down in Indianapolis to step away from my philosophical prerogatives.
Senator Miller has also introduced SB 89 which requires a physician who performs an abortion to: (1) have admitting privileges at a hospital in the county or in a county adjacent to the county where the abortion is performed; and (2) notify the patient of the hospital location where the patient can receive follow-up care by the physician. I believe this is a statutory version of the ordinance adopted by Vanderburgh County when no one was looking.
Telling the patient where medical care is available is entirely appropriate and undoubtedly is done anyway.
There is not a requirement that I know of anywhere in the field of medicine that says that one physician must perform all care and surgical aftercare for all of his/her patients.
We tend to make call coverage or referral arrangements on our own without the government mandating how that is done. When the hospital inadvertently calls me on the cell when I’m skiing in Colorado, I don’t jump on a plane at the government’s insistence to return to Indiana and see the patient. A trusted colleague sees the patient for me. Later I’ll return the favor. Physicians eat, sleep, bathe, vacation, and do other things that occasionally make us unavailable, and yet the world somehow doesn’t stop spinning.
Likewise, if I am performing some minor outpatient procedure and a complication arises, the state doesn’t mandate that I fix that problem myself. I can get a surgeon or other specialist involved if appropriate. I can send the patient to any hospital I deem appropriate.
In the case of abortion, most emergencies would likely be gynecological, or surgical–but not all. It could be medical like an air embolus. The patient might require a pulmonologist and have no use for a gynecologist.
It would be more appropriate for the abortion provider to be required to have a relationship with all of those individuals whose expertise might be needed, than to pedantically require that the provider have privileges and be mandated to provide all care if complications arise.
When you put most of medical care in one category, and have this separate set of rules for treating complications of abortions, you’re basing your medical care on politics or morality rather than science and best practices.
Senator Miller’s thinking is coming up short on this issue.
I fear that if the right to choose is gone, the back street horrors will again come back.
Please use responsibility when doing anything in life, but remember that your actions can hurt others sometimes unconsciously.