GOP abortion foes violate the doctor-patient relationship

"The doctor-patient relationship."

For two decades, Republicans have wielded that four-word talking point as a cudgel to bludgeon health care reform. In 1994, GOP strategist Bill Kristol warned that "the Clinton Plan is damaging to the quality of American medicine and to the relationship between the patient and the doctor." (Future "death panels" fabulist Betsy McCaughey wrongly warned that Americans would even lose the right to see the doctor of their choice.) Twelve years later, President George W. Bush proclaimed, "Ours is a party that understands the best health care system is when the doctor-patient relationship is central to decision-making." Then in 2009, GOP spinmeister Frank Luntz told Republicans obstructing the Affordable Care Act in Congress to "call for the 'protection of the personalized doctor-patient relationship.'" And during the 2012 campaign, the GOP platform declared the party would "ensure the doctor-patient relationship." As Romney adviser and Hoover Institute fellow Dr. Scott Atlas summed up the Republican critique of Obamacare:

"Romney wants to restore the doctor-patient relationship and have healthcare decisions made by patients in conjunction with their doctor, not by a panel of government-appointed bureaucrats...That's good, because doctors in general don't want to practice in an environment where their hands are tied in how to diagnose and treat patients."

Of course, protecting "the doctor-patient relationship" was never anything more than a sound bite, and a grotesquely cynical one at that. As draconian new abortion restrictions in Arkansas, Kansas and other GOP-controlled states show, Republicans are eviscerating the very doctor-patient relationship they pretend to cherish. When it comes to the health of American women, GOP anti-choice leaders across the country are requiring procedures women don't need to undergo and their physicians don't want to perform. And as it turns out, the party that decries "junk science" is mandating just that as it requires doctors to lie to patients about what complications they may'and may not'develop.

Consider, for example, the unprecedented bill now advancing its way through the Kansas legislature towards certain signature by Gov. Sam Brownback. While the current draft dropped a provision "that would have banned abortion clinic workers from volunteering to bake cupcakes for their children's schools," the scope of the legislation is startling. As Huffington Post reported:

The state House Federal and State Affairs Committee passed a 70-page bill that would tax abortions, establish life beginning at fertilization...and prohibit state employees from performing abortions during the workday. The bill also would require doctors to tell women that abortion causes breast cancer, even though the claim defies scientific fact. The bill is likely to pass.

To say that the mythical abortion-breast cancer connection "defies scientific fact" is an understatement. That link has been firmly rejected by organizations including the American Cancer Association and the National Cancer Institute, which concluded that "abortion is not associated with an increase in breast cancer." Nonetheless, the Bush administration repeatedly claimed otherwise on federal government websites aimed at teenagers and pregnant women. As a 2006 congressional investigation found, 20 of 23 federally-funded "pregnancy resource centers," facilities often affiliated with antiabortion religious groups, incorrectly told women "that abortion results in an increased risk of breast cancer, infertility and deep psychological trauma." Nevertheless, when Kansas legislators held hearings on the subject of supposedly cancer-causing abortions, only one witness was asked to testify:

The testimony in front of the committee on Federal and state affairs came from Dr. Angela Lanfranchi, an oncologist specializing in breast cancer. The committee did not hear any other testimony before drafting H.B. 2598.

But Republicans don't merely want American doctors to proactively lie to their patients in order to discourage abortion; they want them to withhold the truth as well.

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