A medical board that certifies obstetricians and gynecologists (OB-GYNs) in the United States and Canada threatened to revoke providers’ certification due to “misinformation and disinformation” around COVID-19 and abortions.
“The dissemination of misinformation and disinformation not only involves COVID-19, but is a threat to the access to and the ability to provide legal and safe evidence-based comprehensive reproductive health care, including contraception and abortion,” the organization said.
“Opinions publicized by OB GYNs about COVID-19, reproductive health care, and abortion should reflect the specialty’s commitment to scientific and clinical excellence and to the needs of our patients.”
Pro-Life Warning
Pro-life medical providers on July 11 issued a warning about ABOG’s threat of revoking practitioners’ medical licenses.The group further warned that ABOG’s statement may prompt some providers to withhold “critical evidence-based information about the harm abortion causes women” and would “force [physicians] to violate [the] Hippocratic oath and duty to [their] patients.”
Legal action might be taken, the statement continued, to protect the “rights of [AAPLOG] members and ensure that physicians are free to provide the information that patients need in order to make a decision based on fully informed consent.”
This dispute comes several weeks after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a 1973 decision that argued women have a constitutional right to obtain an abortion. The ruling means that now states have the ability to pass laws that either restrict or allow abortions.
Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito contended that Roe v. Wade and the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey both were flawed from the start. The ability to obtain an abortion, he said, isn’t a right affirmed by the Constitution.
“The right to abortion does not fall within this category. Until the latter part of the 20th century, such a right was entirely unknown in American law,” he wrote. “Indeed, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, three-quarters of the States made abortion a crime at all stages of pregnancy. The abortion right is also critically different from any other right that this Court has held to fall within the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of ‘liberty.'”