Shocking Law: Doctors Now Allowed to Keep Information About Birth Defects from Women in Order to Stop Abortions

Oklahoma is not a hospitable place for a woman seeking to assert her reproductive rights. There are only three licensed abortion providers in the whole state, and local legislators appear fixated on narrowing residents' already-limited abortion options by passing one restrictive, demeaning, and almost certainly unconstitutional law after another.

On Tuesday, the Oklahoma state legislature overrode the governor's vetoes on two such bills and made them law. One requires that a woman seeking an abortion must look at her ultrasound -- the screen must be in her line of sight (she has the option of covering her eyes) -- as the health care provider narrates the state of the fetus. The other law prevents a woman from suing her doctor for withholding information about potential birth defects.

Within hours of the new laws' passage, the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) went to court to challenge the bills as unconstitutional. Unfortunately, it's not the first time the abortion rights group has taken on the conservative-dominated Oklahoma legislature. In 2008, when these same statutes were passed and made law -- after legislators once again overturned vetoes by Gov. Brad Henry, a Democrat -- CRR filed suit and successfully had the measures struck down.

The Supreme Court has called the passage of such anti-choice laws "a continued failure to abide by the Oklahoma constitution." The state's own highest court has called such legislative attempts "a waste of time for the Legislature and the Court, and a waste of taxpayers' money."

The Republican-dominated legislature's antics are growing quite tiresome -- and offensive. Just a week ago, an Oklahoma district court ruled unconstitutional a 2009 law that created a public Web site where doctors would have to publish personal information, including names, about women who had legally terminated their pregnancies in the state.

Keri Parks, spokesperson for Planned Parenthood of Central Oklahoma, said this most recent onslaught makes the whole abortion process "more devastating for women who are already making a devastating decision."

Parks believes most of the anti-choice bills being crafted and rammed through the state legislature are part of a concerted effort to win pro-life votes in the upcoming midterm elections. Stephanie Toti, staff attorney for CRR, is sure the motivation is not to protect or promote women's health or to promote informed decision-making by pregnant women.

"The effect of these laws is to manipulate the flow of information about options. It's an attempt to coerce a woman to choose the option that the state thinks is best," Toti says. "These laws threaten women's health by reducing access to safe abortion care. They really humiliate women who are seeking abortion and fail to accord them the dignity that they ought be accorded by law."

The new Oklahoma ultrasound requirement is the most extreme and restrictive of all such anti-choice measures in the country. Currently 21 other states have some sort of ultrasound requirement -- but none of these states requires an abortion provider to place the ultrasound monitor in the patient's line of sight and then make her listen to a description of the fetus. No exceptions are made for rape and incest victims, as the health care provider gives a detailed tour of the fetus' limbs, heart and other organs.

The second new law, which bars women from suing their health care provider for withholding information about potential birth defects, is an affront to the doctor-patient relationship. Gov. Henry, when vetoing the bills, said: "It is unconscionable to grant a physician legal protection to mislead or misinform a pregnant woman in an effort to impose his or her personal beliefs on the patient."