Abortion

Legalizing Medical Malpractice: Do Doctors Lie To Stop Patients From Getting Abortions?

Do doctors really deceive their patients in order to "protect the child" from an abortion? As Michelle Goldberg writes in the Daily Beast, yes.

Kansas is just the latest state that would not only requires doctors to lie to their patients about disproven health risks from abortion, but would also protect doctors from culpability or medically liability when they purposefully withhold information from a patient they suspect may terminate a pregancy.

But do doctors really deceive their patients in order to “protect the child” from an abortion? As Michelle Goldberg writes in the Daily Beast, yes.

Cases in which doctors deliberately deceive their patients to stop them from getting abortions aren’t common, but they do happen. Abbott Brown, a lawyer who has been trying wrongful-birth cases for 34 years, says he had one case in which an anti-abortion family doctor overseeing a woman’s pregnancy never performed an ultrasound; the child was born without arms. Speaking to The Washington Post in 2009 after the murder of George Tiller, a doctor who performed late-term abortions, his colleague LeRoy Carhart described a case in which a woman learned, very late in her pregnancy, that her fetus had no brain. “Her doctor knew the problem all along but just never told her,” he said.

Lying to patients not only hurt parents who would terminate a pregnancy gone wrong, but also those who would continue a pregnancy but need early intervention to ensure that any special needs are met during the pregnancy or at the moment of birth.