A fascinating look at the life of doctors who perform abortions, and the decisions facing medical students considering the field.
The controversy starts in medical school, where abortion is not normally taught in formal courses. The field is accompanied by a lifestyle unlike any other specialty, “a subculture replete with drawn blinds, shredders, and security guards at professional conventions.”
Doctors often have to take their spouses’ surnames and deal with how to protect their children against anti-abortion activists. They have aware of their own safety at all times, like this doctor who “notices when a car slows as it drives by her house, and . . . isn’t comfortable sitting in her living room with the shades up.”
That’s some serious additional stress.
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- Did an abortion ban kill this woman?
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- Abortion in Mexico
- Abortion and breast cancer
- Abortion: The cost of changing your mind
- Partial birth abortion ruling
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So to make things worse, I recently read a blurb in the New England Journal of Medicine about a new informed-consent law for abortion in effect as of July in the state of South Dakota which requires a physician to essentially read out a state-mandated “script” to any woman seeking an abortion, which includes “That the abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being” and “That the abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being” amongst other things. This law has been challenged a number of times by Planned Parenthood with the most recent appeal being rejected. I will be curious to see how it fares in the Supreme Court. I am all for informed consent but I find this law to allow dangerous intrusion of religious and political views into the doctor-patient relationship.
It seems this law allows the dangerous intrusion of truth into the doctor-patient relationship.
Some abortion providers have Doctor of Medicine degrees and a medical license, but they are not physicians. That profession has existed long before university degrees and predates the governments issuing the licenses by thousands of years. It is defined ethically by the Hippocratic oath which forbids abortion or other taking of life. It is not defined by technology which is ever changing. Those who use medical technology outside that oath are outside the profession.
For it to be a doctor-patient relationship, there must be a doctor. The prohibition on killing is central to the ethical dimensions of the definition of the physicians. These are not physicians and this is not medical care.
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