Hospital Records - Privacy in Peril

[Guest guest]

February 14, 2004

NY TIMES

Privacy in PerilIn an attempt to bolster its defense of the unconstitutional Partial Birth Abortion Act of 2003, the Bush administration has gone beyond its campaign to destroy women's reproductive rights and has attacked the privacy rights of all Americans.This assault is being conducted through subpoenas the Justice Department has issued demanding that at least six hospitals in New York City, Philadelphia, Illinois and elsewhere turn over hundreds of patient records for certain abortions. This egregious intrusion on patients' privacy is being pursued in the name of defending lawsuits against the abortion ban. Not only is the information not needed to do that, but it is also a flagrant example of why Congress and the attorney general have no business second-guessing sensitive medical decisions made by individuals and their doctors.Judges in New York and Nebraska have barred the administration from enforcing the abortion law in response to suits brought by groups of doctors, who have argued, correctly, that the ban should be struck down because of imprecise wording and the lack of an exception to protect a woman's health. A narrow Supreme Court majority struck down a state ban in 2000 for omitting a health exception. Attorney General John Ashcroft says the fishing expedition his department has started is justified to evaluate whether the procedures covered by the law are ever necessary to preserve a woman's health. In a sound ruling last week, a federal judge in Illinois rebuffed this flimsy argument. Citing state and federal law, as well as Supreme Court precedent, the judge, Charles Kocoras, also rejected the Ashcroft team's astonishing claim that no doctor-patient privilege exists under federal law protecting patients from public disclosure of their records.Unfortunately, the federal judge in New York overseeing one of the legal challenges to the new law does not grasp his duty to protect patient privacy. That judge, Richard Conway Casey of New York's Southern District, has threatened to lift his injunction blocking enforcement of the abortion ban if leading hospitals in New York City and elsewhere fail to produce files on at least several dozen women's abortions. Underscoring the legally dubious nature of Judge Casey's threat, the hospitals in question are not themselves parties to the lawsuit. Nor, for that matter, are the women whose personal privacy Mr. Ashcroft is so determined to invade. Moreover, as Judge Kocoras aptly noted, redacting a patient's name and identification number from her file neither ends the harm to individuals of having intimate details of their medical history publicly disclosed, nor adequately protects the patients' identities.We applaud those hospitals that are resisting Mr. Ashcroft's privacy invasion, and encourage them to stand firm until the legal proceedings run their course. Meanwhile, Americans should see Mr. Ashcroft's intimidating tactics for the dangerous threat to liberty and privacy they really are. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/14/opinion/14SAT1.html?th= & pagewanted=print & position=

[Guest guest]

YEAHHH for Bush!!! So called “reproductive

rights” should be the decision of the female BEFORE

she gets pregnant!

 

Carol

 

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-----Original

Message-----

luckypig [luckypig]

In an attempt to bolster its defense of the

unconstitutional Partial

Birth Abortion Act of 2003, the Bush administration has gone beyond

its campaign to destroy women's reproductive

rights