As mentioned last week ("Key Pro-Life Bills Before the Nebraska Legislature" and "Nebraska's Pro-Life Legislative Day: A Review"), I wanted to let you see more of the pro-life testimony given before the Nebraska Unicameral's Judiciary Committee last Thursday. Specifically, I asked Greg Schleppenbach to send over his remarks made in favor of LB 594. I hope you respond to it appropriately by contacting your State Senators and asking them to vote FOR this bill and FOR LB 675.Senator Ashford and Members of the Judiciary Committee:
My name is Greg Schleppenbach and I am here on behalf of the Nebraska Catholic Conference to urge you to support LB 594. The Conference represents the mutual interests of the Catholic Bishops of Nebraska.
To understand the impetus and objective of this bill it is necessary to understand the nature of abortion practice. According to Nebraska’s Annual Abortion Report, ninety-nine percent of abortions in Nebraska take place in two abortion facilities. One of these facilities does an average of 12-15 abortions in one day, the other does an average of 20 or so in one day.
In this setting, women receive a standardized recorded message to satisfy informed consent requirements and only see the abortion doctor during the 10 minutes or so he is doing the abortion. There is no meaningful doctor-patient relationship in this assembly-line practice of abortion; a practice that turns abortion doctors into mere technicians and their patients into customers.
It is clear from reading the Supreme Court’s abortion rulings (Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton and its progeny) that this practice of abortion is not what the justices had in mind. They explicitly rejected the concept of abortion on demand (which comprises ninety percent of abortions). Chief Justice Burger in his concurring opinion in Doe said the Court expected that “the vast majority of physicians [would] observe the standards of their profession, and act only on the basis of carefully deliberated medical judgments relating to life and health.”
In Roe the Court said “[T]he abortion decision in all its aspects is inherently, and primarily, a medical decision, and basic responsibility for it must rest with the physician. If an individual practitioner abuses the privilege of exercising proper medical judgment, the usual remedies, judicial and intra-professional, are available.” Roe v Wade 410 U.S. 113, 166
It’s also clear that this low standard of care is contrary to the informed consent standards of the American Medical Association. The AMA says “informed consent is more than simply getting a patient to sign a written consent form. It is a process of communication between a patient and physician that results in a patient’s authorization…to undergo a specific medical intervention.” And the AMA puts the responsibility for this communication process on the physician, “not a delegated representative.”
The assembly-line practice of abortion has compromised the standard of care for counseling and screening of patients presumably to reduce costs and maximize profits. As a result, women are suffering from avoidable physical and psychological complications that may have been prevented or minimized if the proper pre-abortion screening standards had been met. You need not oppose legal abortion to conclude that women deserve better than this.
LB 594 tries to restore some semblance of a doctor-patient relationship and increase the standard of care in the practice of abortion. The bill clarifies the duty of physicians to screen for risk factors that even abortion advocates acknowledge place some women at higher risk of post-abortion complications. It would bring the practice of abortion more in line with the ordinary practice of medicine where patients receive personalized counseling based on their individual risk profile, not a standardized recording. And LB 594 will help protect women from being pressured into unwanted, unnecessary and dangerous abortions. Please vote to advance LB 594 to General File.
