This New Bill Would Allow Doctors Lie to Pregnant Women About the Health of Their Baby
(EmiliaU/iStockPhoto)
A bill on its way to the Texas Senate would allow doctors to lie to their patients if they thought it would prevent an abortion.
According to the San Antonio Current, on Monday the Texas Senate Committee on State Affairs unanimously passed Senate Bill 25, which would prevent women from suing doctors for intentionally withholding information about severe fetal abnormalities if the doctor thought that otherwise the woman might consider terminating the pregnancy. Now that bill goes before the Texas Senate. Is anyone optimistic about what’s going to happen to it there?
This would basically say that a doctor has the right to lie to a pregnant woman about her own body and the health of her unborn child. It robs her of any possibility of informed consent or choice, and it undermines the very concept of the doctor-patient relationship. We go to doctors because they are supposed to be experts who will give us important information about our health and how to take care of it. But if the doctors are just allowed to lie to you, why go to the doctor at all? Could you ever trust anything that happened in there?
It’s not even just about abortion access, it’s about allowing women to make informed choices about their healthcare. If a person is carrying a fetus with severe disabilities, she might want to prepare for how she’s going to deal with that. Withholding a woman’s own medical information from her is one of the most astoundingly anti-woman and inhuman actions a doctor or a government could make. A woman has a right to know what is going on in her own body, and if her doctor lies to her about her own health, she should have the right to sue that quack into the next dimension. Don’t you think?
