A Right to Abortion It Is Not

Philip G. Ney MD FRCP(C)

© Sept. 5, 2007 

       Although many believe women have an unencumbered right to have an abortion, this is not true.  Doctor beware.  Neither the Supreme Court of Canada nor the Supreme Court of the USA have ruled in favor of a woman’s legal right to have an abortion at any time for any reason.  They have basically decided that women may have a termination of her pregnancy if and when a woman for health reasons requires it.  They could rule in no other way.  Both courts were determined that the granting and the performing of an abortion be a medical matter.  Therefore the question before every doctor who refers for or performs an abortion is whether or not aborting a woman’s pregnancy is good practice.  If the kind of evidence that is usually applied for any surgical procedure be used, one would must conclude that 98% of abortion is not good evidence based medicine.  It should not be allowed or performed.

      It is no different from aborting a pregnancy for “fetal indications”; to save the life of the preborn child.  To practice legally approved medicine there must be: necessity, benefit, no better treatment, relatively few side effects and consent, all demonstrable beyond reasonable medical doubt.  Otherwise primum non nocere applies.

     In no civilized country I know, has anyone been granted the unfettered right to harm another person.   Ignorance of the harm you are doing is no excuse, especially when being a physician.  If a physician deliberately performs unnecessary and harmful surgery, he/she may be sued, lose his/her license to practice, charged with assault.  I understand there are no exceptions.  If a physician practices harmful bad medicine, he/she cannot expect the protection of the court, only its wrath.    

      Ms. Jones, feeling angry or adventurous, says to her physician, “I have gone to court. I have this document that affirms my right to have any part of my body removed when I want, if I want because it is my body.  I would like you to amputate my left breast.  Being one breasted is becoming fashionable, it cuts in half my chance of having breast cancer and still provides for who ever I like something to play with.  And if you don’t do it right away, I will call you a chauvinist pig and sue you”.

      Given the large amount of good scientific evidence of the short and long term harm done by abortion, any one who now refers for or performs abortions must be either: extremely bold, believe so strongly that abortion is a woman’s right, they disregard the evidence or be blissfully ignorant of the courts intent and evidenced medicine as it applies to abortion.