How would you feel if your dentist told you he’d filed a lawsuit to wipe every rule regulating dentistry off the books — and that he’d done so on your behalf?
“After all,” your trusted dental care provider assures you, “dentistry is one of the safest and most common medical procedures today. The rules and regulations the state imposes on dentists are unnecessary and only drive up the cost of getting your teeth fixed. Everyone deserves a beautiful smile, right?”
Surely you’d twitch a bit in the chair. Then, as the Novocain sets in to make you groggy and the drill begins to whir, you hear him add, “Oh, and by the way, I’m not using my real name — there are some really awful dentists out there, and I wouldn’t want anyone to think that one of them was me.”
Welcome to the alternate universe in which the abortion industry operates. Empowered by friends in the medical and legal professions, abortion businesses have flooded the courts with lawsuits against virtually every kind of health and safety law intended to protect their patients from themselves.
Guess who these characters always say they are representing? You guessed it! They are, of course, representing their “patients” in their efforts to strip safety protections intended to protect … their patients!
When the U.S. Supreme Court declared in Roe v. Wade in 1973 that a constitutional “right to abortion” existed, the case involved a real person — “Jane Roe,” a pseudonym for a young and scared Norma McCorvey. Decades later, McCorvey would become a pro-life advocate and recount how the abortion industry lied to her and misused her for its lawsuit. But several years after Roe, the Supreme Court (all males at the time) concluded that it didn’t need to hear from women in abortion lawsuits.
Since then, federal courts have pretty much assumed carte blanche that abortionists have the right to sue to overturn patient protection laws on behalf of women seeking abortion.
One Louisiana abortion business, June Medical Services, has taken this and run with it, making a career of loudly claiming that it has women’s health at heart while suing to nullify virtually every one of Louisiana’s abortion health and safety regulations. It wishes to overturn safeguards fundamental to outpatient medicine, such as doctor licensing requirements and mandates for patients’ informed consent.
June Medical’s pretense has now landed it in the Supreme Court, where the justices will hear arguments March 4 over whether the abortion business can really show it has patients’ best interest at heart — whether it has the “close relationship” with patients that would be necessary to allow it to speak for the rights of others who aren’t in court.
That requirement for a true “relationship” is where our thought experiment breaks down completely. For a host of reasons, an abortionist and the woman who seeks an abortion remain perfect strangers before and after the procedure. She may not even know his name.
June Medical’s case gets even stranger than that. Also involved in the lawsuit are Louisiana abortion doctors, although no one knows who they are because they’ve kept their identities a secret. The abortionists, in this case, have evaded public scrutiny as June Medical has crafted a lawsuit on behalf of their patients against Louisiana’s emergency complications law. Their case was supposed to be a dead-bang winner after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a similar Texas law in 2016. But a funny thing happened on the way to the courthouse in Baton Rouge — instead of giving up, Louisiana went on the offensive by making June Medical, the mystery abortionists, and the state’s abortion industry the subject of the debate. Now, the Supreme Court will decide whether to end the charade of presuming that the interests of abortionists and those of their patients are so “close” that one can stand in for the other.
Louisiana points out that, like abortion operations elsewhere, abortion clinics and doctors in Louisiana — including June Medical — have racked up a decades-long litany of health and safety violations and professional disciplinary actions. In fact, the court of appeals called June Medical’s history of “generally unsafe conditions and protection of rapists” simply “horrifying.” June Medical, while presuming to challenge Louisiana’s emergency complications law, has itself been cited by the state department of health for having no emergency complications plan in place to protect its patients.
In 2010, the health department cited the clinic for putting abortion patients in “immediate jeopardy” by failing to monitor patients who were under sedation. Various other citations involved lapsed or missing licenses, including a failure to ensure that competent staff were administering intravenous medications and compounding medications for paracervical blocks.
This sordid clinical history didn’t seem to matter to June Medical. Its chief medical officer, one of the anonymous abortionists behind this case, hired and trained doctors to do abortions who were not even OB-GYNs, including a radiologist and an ophthalmologist.
In light of this abysmal track record, isn’t it only reasonable to ask about the mystery abortionists in the June Medical case: “Who are these people?”
I would not want my dentist to be able to litigate the health and safety protections that exist to protect me, the patient, from him. When a doctor files lawsuit after lawsuit to get out from under basic health and safety regulations that he’s repeatedly violated, he shouldn’t be understood to do so for the sake of his patient’s access to healthcare.
Steven Aden serves as chief legal officer and general counsel to Americans United for Life and formerly was co-counsel for the Louisiana Department of Health in June Medical Services v. Russo.
