Conservative Critics Of Obama's Health Proposals Hypocritical On Abortion, Opinion Piece Says

Main Category: Abortion
Article Date: 10 Sep 2009 - 4:00 PDT

email to a friend   printer friendly   opinions  

"Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Tea Partyers at town halls and many GOP members of Congress have been frothing over the idea that supposedly under Obama's public plan, government will be mandating decisions about your health care," Arthur Caplan -- director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania -- writes in a Chicago Tribune opinion piece. He asks, "So why is it that when the subject is abortion and state officials stick their noses right into the practice of medicine, we don't hear a peep from the same crowd about the evil government actually playing a role in how medicine is practiced?"

According to Caplan, 13 states "have laws on the books mandating that doctors take pictures of fetuses carried by pregnant women seeking an abortion." He adds that the laws "lay out exactly what a doctor must do to get 'informed consent' from a woman, even if the woman and her doctor want nothing to do with taking an ultrasound." Caplan continues, "Laws mandating how doctors and patients must interact make no provision for women of different ages or for the circumstances under which a woman may seek an abortion."

Caplan notes that Oklahoma County District Judge Vicki Robertson recently struck down a 2008 state law requiring doctors to perform ultrasound on pregnant women seeking abortion. He writes, "The law she struck down would have required any woman seeking an abortion to have a picture taken of her fetus by means of an ultrasound and then to have the doctor describe in detail the image to the woman even if she did not want to hear this information." According to Caplan, "Robertson tossed out this law on a technicality," as the law was "a mishmash of items concerning abortion rather [than] a single focused piece of legislation."

Caplan continues, "It is very clear that the point of [these] laws is to discourage women from having abortions." It is "also very clear that government bureaucrats are telling doctors and patients precisely what to do," he writes, adding, "They are intervening directly in the practice of medicine." He writes, "Yet no one among the ranks of those yelling about the heavy hand of government allegedly present in the Obama plan has said a word about the evil of the Oklahoma law or any of the other state laws where the Legislature and bureaucrats are ordering doctors to tell their patients what these non-doctors want." Caplan concludes, "When it suits their purposes, those who claim to be horrified that government might play a role in getting you health insurance are hypocritically tolerant of a government bureaucrat telling your doctor what to do" (Caplan, Chicago Tribune, 9/6).

Reprinted with kind permission from http://www.nationalpartnership.org. You can view the entire Daily Women's Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery here. The Daily Women's Health Policy Report is a free service of the National Partnership for Women & Families, published by The Advisory Board Company.

© 2009 The Advisory Board Company. All rights reserved.

• Additional
• References
• Citations