Sen. Marsha Blackburn is introducing a bill on Thursday that aims to ensure “informed consent” for women seeking an abortion procedure.
The legislation, titled the “Woman’s Right to Know Act,” was introduced in 2020 by Sens. Kelly Loeffler and Blackburn but failed to pass committee. Blackburn is reintroducing the bill, which, if approved, would require providers to explain “all medical risks” associated with an abortion procedure being requested, to explain the gestational age and development features of the fetus at the time, and to provide that information at least 24 hours in advance of the procedure.
“For far too long, organizations like Planned Parenthood have targeted vulnerable women and pressured them to make life and death medical decisions without informed consent,” she said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “The Woman’s Right to Know Act protects the sanctity of life for women and children across the nation by establishing long-overdue standards for the predatory abortion industry.”
WHY SHOULD ABORTIONISTS BE EXEMPT FROM PROTECTING WOMEN’S HEALTH AND SAFETY?
When asked for specific examples of women that would have found more information helpful to them when making the decision to have an abortion, the senator responded, “I wouldn’t do it as a specific example. I would approach it as this: There are women that I know that I have encountered through women’s groups at churches, women that have experienced abortion, and they have commented that if they had known the physical, mental, emotional impact of what was happening, they would have made a different decision.”
But among advocates in the political fight over abortion, there are disagreements as to what are the medical risks of such procedures.
When such bills have been passed at the state level, disagreements like these affect conversations over what doctors should have to tell their patients.
“We are always looking at what is happening in the states, and we’re regularly talking to individuals that are in the pro-life community and people that are in the healthcare community,” Blackburn said in response to a question about such disagreements. “And there are some things that people think are important. If you go to a hospital and you are going to have a procedure, what do they do? They give you the information.”
“They do not have the information on what some of the side effects could be, the processes they will go through physically, emotionally, mentally,” she added. “There just needs to be a more complete process and preparation for that procedure.”
In 2006, the left-leaning Guttmacher Institute argued that informed consent is a “bedrock principle of medical ethics. Moreover, the obligation to provide such information is mandated by statute or case law in all 50 states.”
“Under the banner of informed consent, a majority of states have enacted abortion counseling laws requiring physicians to provide specified information to women seeking abortions,” the group said. “Many of these laws require the state health department to develop detailed written materials that must be distributed to women prior to the procedure. An analysis of these state-developed materials demonstrates that they do not always measure up to the gold standard of informed consent. Particularly with regard to certain hot-button issues, the information presented is either out-of-date, biased or both.”
A law in this vein that was passed in Pennsylvania was challenged before the Supreme Court in 1992. The court upheld the law, asserting that abortion was “an act fraught with consequences … for the woman who must live with the implications of her decision.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“If an abortion seller already offers women adequate counseling, then this legislation will have no significant impact on its counseling,” Focus on the Family, a socially conservative advocacy group, argued in 2013 about bills like the one proposed by Blackburn. “Information is power and there is no evidence that requiring minimal standards for counseling harms women; on the contrary, it enables women to make decisions with medically accurate information.”
As both chambers of Congress are controlled by Democrats, the bill is unlikely to become law. When asked whether she thought she had the votes and what her colleagues thought of the legislation, the senator responded, “Many of my colleagues think that this is an appropriate bill because it really kind of begs the question, ‘Well, why aren’t they given the information?'”
Editor’s note: A sentence about studies exploring a link between breast cancer and abortion has been removed.
