S.D. Abortion Script Threatens Doctor-Patient Relationship, NEJM Opinion Piece Says

21.11.2008 A South Dakota law that requires a physician to tell a woman seeking an abortion that the procedure "will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being" with whom she has an "existing relationship" signals "a new step in states' efforts to restrict abortion," Zita Lazzarini of the University of Connecticut Health Center and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Hygiene and Public Health writes in the New England Journal of Medicine. According to Lazzarini, the law -- which went into effect in July -- "has import far beyond the borders of South Dakota," particularly because it calls physicians' First Amendment rights into question.

Although the 1992 Supreme Court ruling Planned Parenthood v. Casey established that states can require physicians to give pregnant women information that "a reasonable patient could consider material to the decision of whether or not to undergo the abortion," the 1977 ruling in Wooley v. Maynard established that when "required speech serves the state's ideological interests, the state's authority cannot 'outweigh an individual's First Amendment right to avoid becoming the courier for such information,'" Lazzarini writes. She adds that "although state legislatures have substantial discretion to define terms used in their laws" -- such as defining a fetus as a human being in biologic terms -- "they cannot merely use the iteration of definitions to cloak religious, philosophical or metaphysical language in statutory garments and call it 'scientific' or 'biologic.'"