blargblog
An expulsive extension of
The U.S. Department of Justice—you know, the one run by crisco-annointed John Ashcroft—has demanded hundreds of patient medical records of women who have had an abortion. Why? So they can defend the ban on so-called "partial-birth abortions" from a legal challenge by doctors who claim the ban affects medically necessary abortions.
Um, hul-loo?! Patient confidentiality? It's a right that has become rather sacred to most people, especially in an era when delicate medical conditions are politicized and science is treated like voodoo. Yet a federal judge in Manhattan has threatened to punish hospital administrators who refuse to comply with the DoJ's subpoenas—including the lifting of an injunction prohibiting the ban's enforcement this same judge imposed last November. Pardon me, I could be wrong, but last I heard, turning over a patient's medical records was at the discretion of the patient, not a doctor, let alone that of of a hospital bureaucrat.
Apparently, the DoJ disagrees, arguing that since patients share medical decisions with both doctors and HMOs, patients cannot always expect confidentiality. Sooo...we should just sign our rights over to big corporations? Why not just bare our hindquarters to them, too?
All of which is B.S. The DoJ wants to examine these medical records to determine whether or not cases where intact dialation and extraction was performed were actually medically necessary or, as a DoJ lawyer put it, "if it was just the doctor's preference to perform the procedure." By whose standards? Put another way: Whose medical judgement should a patient trust—a doctor's or a federal investigator conducting a witch hunt? Sorry, but promises to black out the names and addresses of the patients just don't cut it.
Me comrade Ms. Barnes, from whom I found this article, asks, "Why is it always the men who are trying to take away the rights of women?" But in my view this is an issue that affects not only women—although it does so in a thoroughly insulting way—but it affects men, too, because the principle of patient confidentiality is being so aggressively trampled on. (To answer Bethanne's question: Because the group in power always seeks to maintain or augment its power at the expense of the powerless or less-empowered. Cf. the Federal Budget.)
Fortunately a federal judge in Chicago has dismissed a subpoena against Northwestern University Medical Center, arguing that a woman should be able to consult a physician on such a sensitive matter as abortion without fear of public disclosure. The same can be said for a diagnosis of HIV, treatment for impotency or infertility, prescriptions for mental illness...the list goes on.
UPDATE: (ten minutes later) You can find a fine analysis and a some cross-blogginatin' discussion of this issue over at (where else?) Alas, a Blog. Go, Barry.