Compassionate Coercion

The confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the Secretary of Health and Human Services shifts healthcare regulation away from compassionate coercion and towards individual empowerment.

Currently, the medical community infantilizes patients through what might be called compassionate coercion. Rather than neutrally presenting benefits and risks, healthcare practitioners use expert knowledge generated through research replete with conflicts of interest towards the goal of convincing—often through coercive tactics—patients to take a specific drug or follow a favored treatment protocol.

The medical community believes these coercive tactics are justified on the basis of compassion and love. Although the response to the COVID pandemic is an obvious example of the medical community’s embrace of compassionate coercion, the way pro-abortion states handle the administration of abortion drugs through telemedicine shows how patient care is often subservient to political interests.

Because of the inherently inflammatory nature of abortion, pro-choice medical providers and government officials are quick to defend access to abortion, even when open access undermines informed consent and facilitates abuse.

In an interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingram, Secretary Kennedy discussed his intention to further study safety concerns with abortion drugs. This aligns with Kennedy’s agenda to focus  HHS on “radical transparency,” while removing conflicts of interest that undermine the public’s trust in scientific information.

It is precisely Kennedy’s insistence on upending the corrupt status quo that made him an outcast of the Democratic Party. Furthermore, and crucial to the pro-life movement, addressing safety concerns with abortion medication is something intellectually honest pro-choice Americans will embrace. Choice and coercion are always mutually exclusive. Thus, to the extent open access to abortion drugs facilitates abuse, pro-choice advocates should be interested in preventing exploitation and coercion to ensure women make informed decisions, free from undue influence.

However, like almost every issue in modern America, healthcare is rife with politicization. Pro-choice activists have long focused on protecting the abortion procedure rather than informed consent and choice. This is a movement that hides behind euphemisms and opposes laws requiring abortionists to provide complete information, such as ultrasound images, to women prior to scheduling an abortion.

Thus, it should come as no surprise that pro-abortion activists support open access to abortion medication. The Biden administration lifted a requirement that prevented providers from prescribing abortion drugs without an in-person visit. In the wake of the Dobbs decision, this has allowed abortion providers in pro-choice states to put drugs into the hands of individuals thousands of miles away, with no reasonable way to mitigate the risk of abuse.

Most Americans are not strongly pro-life or pro-abortion. While viewpoints vary on this contentious issue, most Americans favor some gestational limits on abortion. Since most abortions are now performed through medication, regulations surrounding access to and administration of abortion drugs represent the newest battleground in the abortion policy debate.

The loose restriction on the use of abortion drugs is one of the many medical areas the Trump administration intends to further study, and for good reasons.

A recent case from Louisiana highlights how the left weaponizes compassion to support abortion rather than women and their “right to choose.”

Grand jurors in Louisiana indicted Dr. Margaret Carpenter, a New York physician, for criminal abortion after she prescribed abortion pills to the Louisiana mother of a pregnant minor. The pregnant girl took the abortion pill, which triggered a medical emergency, ending the girl’s pregnancy and landing her in the hospital. The same grand jury also indicted the pregnant girl’s mother for the illegal abortion.

This story highlights the tension between pro-choice versus pro-abortion advocacy. New York Governor Hochul was adamant in her support for abortion doctors violating pro-life laws by prescribing abortion pills across state lines while showing no regard for the fact that the drugs were prescribed and used despite the pregnant woman’s desire to carry her child to term. In a statement expressing why she refuses to honor Louisiana’s extradition request, Hochul said she would “do everything” in her power “to protect this doctor and allow her to continue the work she’s doing that is so essential.”

Neither the American public, Trump, nor Kennedy are pro-life advocates. However, if the goal is to protect choice, then women must have access to all relevant information prior to an abortion—chemical or surgical. Furthermore, doctors should be required by law to follow basic ethical guidelines to ensure the drugs they prescribe are given to the patient—not third parties—and used as intended.

Trump’s decision to address safety concerns related to the abortion pill can, and likely will, gain broad public support because it addresses issues of coercion and abuse ignored in progressive spaces. Cases such as the one from Louisiana expose a fault line between pro-choice and pro-abortion advocates. This is because open access to the abortion pill through telemedicine increases the risk of abuse and medical malpractice, which runs against the principle of choice.

Pro-choice advocates often state abortion pills are “safer than tylenol” and have rejected Louisiana’s classification of abortion pills as a dangerous substance. For example, a group of physicians dissenting from this classification state there is no reason to believe abortion pills have “any potential for abuse, dependence, public health risk, nor high rates of adverse side effects.”

Cases such as the one above prove this statement is incorrect for several reasons.

First, as the Louisiana case shows, open access to abortion pills makes it easy for third parties to obtain these pills in the hope that pregnant mothers who want to carry a child will take the drugs. These mothers may cave to external pressure to abort, be coerced into taking the medication, or unknowingly consume the drugs, leading to an unwanted induced abortion.

Second, even for pro-choice Americans unconcerned with the value of unborn life, the “safety” of abortion pills for the mother depends on a number of factors related to taking the pills as intended. One of the most obvious risk factors is gestational age. The FDA currently approves the use of medication for abortions up to 10 weeks. This is because abortion pills are more likely to cause side effects, including hemorrhaging, as a woman’s pregnancy progresses. Thus, when doctors prescribe abortion pills across state lines, without the ability to assess gestational age through an in-person visit, they are running the risk of blindly prescribing pills to women without being able to accurately evaluate risk.

Third, doctors who prescribe abortion drugs across state lines may do so without verifying the intention of the pregnant woman. This is incredibly dangerous because it means the doctor is prescribing pills to someone who is not the intended user of that medication.

In such circumstances, the doctor cannot verify with any degree of reasonable certainty whether the pregnant woman herself wants to ingest the drug or if she can be trusted to take the medication as intended. This, of course, increases the risks of negative side effects and medical emergencies that cause pregnant women, such as the Louisiana teenager, to end up in the hospital after receiving botched medical “care.”

The pro-life community should speak to the public clearly about the ease with which pro-abortion advocacy strips women of choice while enabling abusive individuals and emboldening shoddy medical care.

While the problems with compassionate coercion within the American medical system are broad, the way the left handles the issue of abortion should be brought to the public’s attention. Because of the extreme nature of the Democratic Party’s current stance on abortion, pro-life Americans don’t need to focus on converting the public to their viewpoint. Instead, they should shine a spotlight on the radical culture of death rampant on the left.

***

Leslie Corbly, author of Silent Suffering: Poems of Pain and Purpose.