Arizona's GOP: Who cares if the procedure is unproven? Doctors must tell women about it
Let's say you have a stomachache and go to the doctor, but a new state rule mandates that your physician
must tell you about an unproven procedure involving monkey dung and turnip juice. Hey, a guy in Malaysia says it works! For what medical procedure are doctors
required to do something like this—tell you about unproven, experimental treatments? Well, we have one.
That's the substance of SB 1318 in Arizona, which passed the legislature yesterday and immediately landed on Gov. Doug Ducey's desk. He's been such a suck-up to Cathi Herrod and her far-right Center for Arizona Policy (CAP), which has spearheaded at least 30 anti-abortion measures here, that it's unlikely the former ice cream businessman will veto the bill.
UPDATE: Ducey did sign the bill on March 30. Herrod called it "a good day for Arizona women."
SB 1318 started out bad enough, as a measure prohibiting private insurers from offering abortion coverage to patients who signed up on the federal exchange. But it became even more odious when an amendment was slipped in that requires physicians to tell women about an unproven procedure that might reverse the effects of the abortion pill. The bill also directs the Arizona Department of Health Services to list the experimental and highly controversial practice on its website.
Worse and worser over the bump.
The CAP and anti-abortion zealots in the legislature have been attaching clinic and physician requirements to this legal procedure for decades, resulting in the closure of every Planned Parenthood center in rural Arizona. Now comes another requirement, SB 1318, which some physicians say is based on junk science. Arizona's Senator Minority Leader Katie Hobbs went even further, calling it "medical malpractice" and "quack medicine." It's a quack law too, requiring abortion providers to tell patients that, should they change their mind after taking RU-486 (the abortion pill), a procedure exists that can reverse the process.
George Delgado, a doctor who opposes abortion, said in a 2012 study in the journal Annals of Pharmacotherapy that he had developed a way to reverse the abortion procedure before the woman had taken her dose of misoprostol, in case she changed her mind after taking the first one. Delgado reported that he injected six women with the hormone progesterone after they took their first dose of abortion medication, and that four of them went on to have live births.
First is the problem of results, because RU-486 is a two-step procedure and Delgado's hormone injections occur after the first step; so it's not possible to say his practice "reversed" the abortion when the patient did not complete every step of the process. Dr. Kathleen Morrell, a New York City abortion provider,
said "there is no other research to back up Delgado's study or to test the safety of his experimental procedure." According to
Dr. Cheryl Chastine, an abortion provider at a Kansas Clinic:
"There's no evidence of any demonstrable effect of the 'treatment' these anti-abortion centers are marketing... The medical literature is quite clear that mifepristone on its own is only about 50 percent effective at ending a pregnancy. That means that even if these doctors were to offer a large dose of purple Skittles, they'd appear to have 'worked' to 'save' the pregnancy about half the time."
But, hey, no worry. Even if the science is unproven and hotly debated, the bill's provisions don't "dictate any practice of medicine,"
says Arizona GOP Rep. Eddie Farnsworth: "It is simply disclosure." Sure,
disclosure of an unproven method! How many other untested, unproven and experimental medical procedures must doctors disclose to patients? Zilch. The bill is "just politics in the exam room at its worst,"
says Hayley Smith of the ACLU, one of many groups urging Gov. Ducey to
veto SB 1318.
In addition to the procedure's medical uncertainty, the bill is patronizing and offensive says Dr. Morrell, who has counseled hundreds of patients and says not one of them has changed her mind in the middle of the RU-486 procedure.
"The bill treats women like their thought processes aren't complete, as if women aren't thoughtful... We as providers already have evidence-based protocols and relationships with our patients. We talk to them about their abortion, we do everything to ensure their certainty. I think that the ultimate goal of this legislation is to get in between a woman and a doctor and create some kind of stigma and uncertainty in that relationship."
Of course, Arizona's fundy GOP doesn't care that neither the FDA nor any professional OB-GYN group has approved the reversal treatment. Nor do the wingers give a lick about offending women. They simply want to sow doubt in people's minds, erect more barriers to safe abortions and cement their theocratic dogma, permanently and intractably, between doctor and patient. Small government indeed.