When zealots take over medical boards
by digby
You think they’ve sunk as low as they can sink and then they surprise you:
The Kansas State Board of Healing Arts, the governing body that regulates the practice of medicine in the state, stripped the medical license of a woman who refused to force a mentally-ill 10 year old to give birth.
As Robin Marty reports, Dr. Ann Neuhaus became the target of domestic terror group Operation Rescue after her colleague, Dr. George Tiller, was murdered. Neuhaus assisted Tiller by providing second opinions for mental health exceptions for late-term abortions.
Operation Rescue filed a negligence complaint against Neuhaus alleging that her exams were not thorough enough to support her medical conclusions and her follow-up care was inadequate because she did not recommend counseling or hospitalization after each procedure.
Neuhaus offered a rebuttal of her own. “To even claim that isn’t medically necessary qualifies as gross incompetence,” said Neuhaus. “Someone’s 10 years old, and they were raped by their uncle and they understand that they’ve got a baby growing in their stomach and they don’t want that. You’re going to send this girl for a brain scan and some blood work and put her in a hospital?”
Like other states, Kansas has made recent attempts to stack their medical review board with anti-choice advocates like former Operation Rescue attorney Richard Macias. When hearing the case against Dr. Neuhaus, the board offered up their own expert to determine if any breach of the standard of care occurred. Not surprisingly, the witnessed insisted that in no cases is abortion a treatment that could be seen as beneficial to a patient’s mental health, further clouding the waters as to the kind of care girls and women can expect in the state of Kansas.
Forcing a 10 year old rape victim to go through childbirth is sadism, pure and simple. And any medical practitioner who testifies under oath that abortion would not be beneficial to a pregnant 10 year old rape victim’s mental health should have their license revoked immediately.
It’s quite clear that they would rather that little girl go through devastating, painful, life threatening childbirth, which she cannot fully understand, than allow an abortion. Clearly, they value potential life far, far more than they value the living.
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