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.

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”.

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.

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