NEJM vs The Supreme Court

Editorials blast the recent partial-birth abortion ruling:

“With this decision the Supreme Court has sanctioned the intrusion of legislation into the day-to-day practice of medicine,” writes Dr. Jeffrey M. Drazen, the Boston-based journal’s editor. Physicians are open to oversight and discussion of delicate matters, he says, but those discussions should occur “among informed and knowledgable people who are acting in the best interests of a specific patient.”
The political ruckus over Terri Schiavo in 2005 demonstrated “the disastrous consequences of congressional interference” in a medical case, Drazen writes. And now, “the judicial branch has regrettably joined the legislative branch in practicing medicine without a licence.”

Comments

Anonymous
Partial birth abortions should be banned. They endanger women. Better to wait until the baby is born and then kill it. After all it comes pretty close to the definition of someone eligible to be euthanized. Incontinent, unable to feed or hydrate itself, unable to communicate meaningfully. Totally dependent. The little post-fetus is just asking to be terminated. What right does the law have to tell us we can’t croak a baby just because it has breathed a few times. It is still just about as dependent as it was prior to birth. And it is still made completely of the mothers substance. It is her body and her right to do anything she wants to with it. And I say she should be allowed to kill her children until you can prove that more than 50 % of the kids body mass is derived from nutrition that has not passed through the mother first. Think about all the poor girls who are traumatized and demonized just because they strangle their infants after birth rather than before. It is tragic and must stop.
Anonymous
One would think that this was the first time the government legislated the practice of medicine.
It would be interesting to look back and see what the NEJM had to say about:
The federal abrogation of privacy for medicare patient, in which the feds see what records they want when they want.
Numerous state laws outlawing or severely limiting ECT.
Numerous state laws putting additional restrictions on prescribing of controled substances beyond medical prudence.
Laws abrogating the privacy rights of patients receiving controlled subtances.
etc, etc
Anonymous
In the professional oath that I took, abortion was considered outside the practice of medicine anyway. But still, how dow they intrude on my autonomy. What is Congress going to do next, tell me I can’t euthanize the mentally retarded!! How dare they!
ema
Partial birth abortions should be banned. They endanger women.
You forget where you’re posting! This is a medical blog. Don’t make nonsensical claims. If you have the data to support your assertion, we (and all the Ob/Gyn specialty journals) are all ears.
But still, how dow they intrude on my autonomy. What is Congress going to do next…
What Congress is going to do next is anybody’s guess. For now, Congress has banned intact removal and declared fetal dismemberment the standard of care for D&Es, not because there’s any evidence to support this decision*, but simply because, apparently, they find intact removals icky.
Anonymous
Sorry Ema, I was being “ironic.” Really, I think that the killing of a child is not less reprehensible just because it has not breathed independently. It is patently absurd to be trying to save an infant of the same gestational age in the room next to a team killing another baby just because it is “inconvenient.” There has been virtually no data presented to suggest that the procedure has any medical validity in preserving the health or life of the mother.
ema
Really, I think that the killing of a child is not less reprehensible just because it has not breathed independently.
Once again I must remind you that this is a medical blog. Facts matter. Just because you think pregnancy termination is infanticide (“killing of a child”) does not magically make it so.
It is patently absurd to be trying to save an infant of the same gestational age in the room next to a team killing another baby just because it is “inconvenient.”
Of course it is! ‘Cause as we learn in doc school 101, when you have two female patients in adjacent rooms they automatically became indistinguishable (same CC, same H&P, same indication), by virtue of their uterine content.
There has been virtually no data presented to suggest that the procedure has any medical validity in preserving the health or life of the mother.
This posting on a med blog just isn’t working out for you, is it?
Assuming that by “the procedure” you mean intact D&E, I can actually provide links to the data–both the legal, trial record one, and the medical one–supporting the safety advantages of intact D&Es.
But since you’re the one making [uninformed] claims, you go first. Support your claim about “virtually no data”.
Anonymous
Legislatures have always intruded into the practice of medicine in dozens if not hundreds of ways. It is just that prior to Roe vs. Wade, it was almost entirely state legislatures, as that is where the US constituiton put the matter of the regulation of medical practice when it demured from enumerating it as a federal matter in the body of the constitution and then gave the demurement the power of a prohibition in the tenth amendment of the bill of rights.
The federal judiciary eventually decided that it did not like the musty old writen document, and taking advantage of the cowardice of the other two branches of federal government in the matter of defending the constitution, and the prostration of the states under the Grand Army of the Republic, begin rewriting a new “living constitution” to it’s own liking.
A center piece of that rewriting has been to remove the regulation of abortion from the states and seize it unto the breast of the federal government. This ruling is essentially of scarcely any consequence, recognizing only a cession of a small measure of the power to legislate in health care, seized from the states, to the legislative branch of the federal government.
Enthusiasts for Roe v Wade need not feel so threated, the federal tyranny has not been overturned and is fully intact, just a bone thrown to the branch that votes the courts salaries. The most recent action by the court was not a move into more regulation of medical practice, but rather a move away from the court taking all power unto itself in regulating that.
Now for the court to have said simply that the US Constitution provides no basis for the federal government to have any involvement in regulating the practice of medicine, overturning Roe v Wade and Congress’s partial birht abortion ban both in one fell swoop and returning the entire matter to the states where it rested comfortably for 182 years, now that would be a big deal.
Anonymous
In 1973 the US Supreme Court violated the 10th amendment in meddling where the constitution gave it, or any other branch of the federal government, no authority to meddle. Now it is merely conceding that Congress has the same right to the stolen goods at it does.

NEJM vs The Supreme Court

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