Medicine and Politics Don't Mix

Lately, medicine has become one of the most pertinent issues in politics. Whether it's the universal health care debate we've been hearing at a national level for the past few years or the fairly recent Texas bill requiring women to get a sonogram before getting an abortion, political ideologies have often left us, the citizens, at the wayside while actively working to make our standard of living worse. The most recent event in this timeline is a so-called "gag order" in the state Women's Health Program (WHP), as an Austin American-Statesman article* explains. The proposed rule would forbid doctors in the  program from advising their patients with respect to abortion.

To give you some perspective, the WHP is a state funded organization designed to replace the federally funded Planned Parenthood clinics. The Texas Legislature barred Planned Parenthood in Texas in 2011 because some Planned Parenthood clinics performed abortions. This sparked outrage from the White House, which said that it would stop funding the WHP. Rick Perry's response was a promise to fund the WHP without federal funding and to run it under his own ideology. The WHP is now the only clinic dedicated to helping low-income Texas women, and it no longer allows doctors to so much as mention the word abortion.

This is not a policy aimed at helping the low-income women that the WHP is supposed to serve. It's a policy based solely in the GOP anti-abortion ideology, which makes no exceptions and views abortion as absolutely evil under any and all circumstances. Abortion is perfectly legal in Texas right now, but politicians like Rick Perry are doing everything they can to deny that legal privilege to whomever they can. In this case, they deny it to low-income women. This is not fair. These women are poor and sick. They deserve to hear all of their medical options, not just the ones which are GOP-approved.

This would be bad enough, but according to the Statesman article, many doctors feel discouraged from joining the WHP because of this rule. The rule forbids them from giving what they might believe is sound medical advice, and thus it prevents them from being ethical doctors and doing their jobs. If rules like this make enough of a difference in the program, there may be too few doctors signing up to joining the WHP, and the program could fail. Then low-income women would have nowhere to go and our state would host an even worse health care system than it already does. The GOP's ideology does not belong in medicine. Doctors should be allowed to freely discuss their patients' health. This rule deserves to be repealed.

*Editorial Board. "Remove abortion advice 'gag order.'" The Austin American-Statesman. Opinion. Published August 9, 2012. Accessed August 10, 2012.