Newsgroups: talk.abortion
Subject: Re: Medical Enforcers? (Was: Holtsinger on Harassment & Health)
From: garvin+@cs.cmu.edu (Susan Garvin)
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1992 18:41:35 GMT
Distribution: na
Organization: School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon

In article <1992Nov9.231922.16381@midway.uchicago.edu> eeb1@midway.uchicago.edu writes:
#In article <1992Nov9.184241.12652@nas.nasa.gov>
#dking@raul.nas.nasa.gov (Dan King) writes:
##In article <1992Nov8.064722.10308@midway.uchicago.edu>
##eeb1@quads.uchicago.edu (e elizabeth bartley) writes:
# 
###I've recently made it clear that I support requiring medical approval,
###not judicial approval.... 


She says, and then goes on to define medical approval as something
that requires judicial approval exp post.
##You mentioned this before, and I asked you about it, but either I missed
##your reply or you missed my question.  How is this suppose to work?  
##Currently the medical profession has no such ability to make or 
##enforce legislation.  If you allow legislation to determine when
##abortions are allowed, you are taking it out of the hands of the
##medical profession.  This would leave it up to the judiciary to
##enforce.  So would you ellaborate on how you would write legislation
##that would keep the judiciary out of the equation?
#
#In an emergency, any doctor qualified to diagnose if a third-term
#abortion is need and to perform one could go ahead and perform one but
#might have to justify the abortion afterwards.  (Of course, if he
#doesn't perform one and she dies, there's no "might" about him having
#to justify his lack of treatment.)

This certainly doesn't keep the judiciary out of the equation.  It
does, however, make the doctor's decision more complicated, and 
might result in that doctor doing something that would endanger
the woman's health (but keep her alive) because of the hassle of
explaining the decision to abort to the courts.

#In other cases, doctors who are certified qualified to diagnose
#conditions which require an abortion (ask the AMA who; I would guess
#all gynecologists and some others) can diagnose a needed abortion.
#Two opinions (one could be granted over the phone or after looking at
#faxed information if need be) are needed for a legal abortion.
#Barring having accepted a bribe or giving false information to another
#doctor to secure a concerring opinion, the worst he could face (say,
#for routinely certifying every case in which a woman says she wants an
#abortion as a case in which an abortion is medically necessary) would
#be losing his certification to perform or authorize an abortion (with
#a second opinion) without any possibility of having it legally
#questioned afterwards.

Any M.D. can diagnose any illness, legally speaking.  I called the
AMA and checked.  Board certification implies expertise, it is not
a requirement to practice.  It sounds as if a new form of regulation
is being suggested for physicians.  

#This obviously lets the doctors override the laws on abortion at will.
#But I've no reluctance to let them do that, partially because of a gut
#instinct that if the medical profession as a whole feels that strongly
#about the matter maybe they outta be able to and mostly because it
#would be very difficult to stop them from doing so in any case (I've
#been told that there were some hospitals before Roe which routinely
#performed illegal but medically necessary abortions; they were called
#tonsilectomies or appendectomies and nobody involved admitted they
#weren't; a third-term ban would be much harder to circumvent, but not
#impossible ... the doctors could pretend she spontaneously went into
#labor and the best they did to save both killed the fetus).

I am not aware of any state that forbade abortions to save a woman's
life before Roe.  I'm also not aware of any doctors who claimed to
have done an appendectomy when they actually had performed an abortion.
I am aware of doctors who just recorded that they had done a D and C
and didn't mention that the woman was pregnant.  I'm also aware that
many hospitals had "abortion boards" that decided if an abortion
was medically necessary in the years before Roe.  I'm aware that
these boards granted the permission to do the procedure based on
factors other than medical necessity, such as current public
opinion (the Sherry Finkbein case) and the number of abortions
already approved in that year.  I'm aware that poor women rarely
had their petitions approved.  

I'm at a loss as to how Beth thinks that this will prevent
"unnecessary" late term abortions in a way that they are not
currently prevented, other than denying women who are carrying
severely deformed or dead fetuses their right to abort.  I 
know that there are only a few doctors who will perform late
abortions now, and I know that at least one of them refuses to
do them when he thinks they aren't necessary.  This still sounds
like legislation for its own sake, with the added frill of
more government interference in medicine via new forms of
certification.

Susan