Written by Maya Manian for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.

Playing games with women's health? (Photo: Erik / Flickr)

Informed consent is one of the cornerstones of health-care law and its basic principles have been well-established for decades. Informed consent law reflects the fundamental notion that every competent adult has a right to make the ultimate decisions about her healthcare that will affect her life prospects. A single driving goal animates informed consent law — respect for patient autonomy. Informed consent law preserves patient autonomy by protecting the patient’s bodily integrity and self-determination.

Canterbury v. Spence, a leading case on informed consent, set forth the key principle that “it is the prerogative of the patient” to decide “the direction in which his interests seem to lie.” Thus, the doctrine of informed consent compels the disclosure of accurate medical information consistent with the expert knowledge of the medical community.

This rule ensures that patients receive sufficient information to make their own decisions about whether to consent to medical treatment. Informed consent law’s long-established principles have been perverted in the context of abortion legislation. Anti-choice laws claiming to ensure well-informed decisions for women in fact misuse informed consent terminology to further goals antithetical to the imperatives animating informed consent law.

In an en banc opinion, the Eighth Circuit recently upheld South Dakota’s mandate that physicians inform women seeking abortion care that “an increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide” is a known risk of the abortion procedure. Responding to the Eighth Circuit’s holding, South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley declared, “Today’s decision supports the Legislature’s goal of encouraging women seeking an abortion to make informed and voluntary decisions.” Although this statement invokes notions of patient autonomy, South Dakota’s abortion law actually turns on its head informed consent law’s respect for patient self-determination through the provision of accurate, relevant information. As Jennifer Keighley has summarized, South Dakota’s claims about abortion and suicide risk are scientifically dubious. While Planned Parenthood v. Casey permitted abortion-specific informed consent laws, it emphasized that only “truthful, nonmisleading” information would be constitutionally permissible.  But the weight of medical evidence indicates that South Dakota’s legislation is untruthful and misleading.  The Eighth Circuit’s decision to uphold medically-inaccurate information is not surprising, however, given that a similarly ideologically divided court previously upheld South Dakota’s requirement that physicians inform abortion patients “that the abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being” — hardly the unbiased information demanded by informed consent doctrine.

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Written by Jessica Mason Pieklo for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.

Find all articles about this court decision here.

The federal judiciary is in the process of rendering the idea of “informed consent” in the context of abortion all but nonsensical and there may be nothing we can do about it.

On Tuesday the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the constitutionality of a South Dakota law that requires doctors to inform women seeking abortions that they face an increased risk of suicide should they go forward with the procedure. The reason the suicide-link mandate, a provision tied up in litigation since 2005, was deemed acceptable to the seven conservative justices and Reagan appointees, was because the statement was deemed “truthful.”

Of course the “truth” of suicide-abortion link is hardly truth at all. The analysis of data on which the judges was at least partly based is considered so flawed the journal that published the findings originally is considering retracting the article together. In trial and appeal Planned Parenthood and the challengers submitted extensive data to rebut the claim that abortion is linked to suicide in their challenge of the law.

So how was the Eight Circuit able to support such a finding? Thank Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.

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