Skype-Dates with Doctors Prompt Anti-Choice Backlash

The wonderfully connective power of webcams has expanded into a new realm of long distance relationships: the medical field. Telemedicine is the practice of providing health care (including interaction with a doctor) via videoconference, thus eliminating the need for long commutes by those living in rural areas. The technology itself is fairly uncontroversial, as it increases medical attention for those living far from physicians. But in Iowa, the method is being put to a particular use that has conservatives outraged: providing the “abortion pill.”

Planned Parenthood of the Heartland has instituted a program allowing women seeking abortions to undergo the required exams and investigations (blood tests, ultrasounds, medical histories, etc.) with a nurse, watch an eight minute video detailing the procedure and its risks and then videoconference with a doctor who can remotely control the release of mifepristone (previously known as RU-486) and misoprostol. Pro-lifers have objected to the new use of this web technology and recently reiterated their request that the Iowa Board of Medicine stop this practice on the grounds that it fails to comply with a state requirement that doctors administer abortions (surgical or otherwise).

Here we have another outspoken minority in danger of overturning the opinions (and rights) of the majority. (Note that over 1500 women have taken advantage of this program since June 2008.) Should the intensity of the opposition overrule the more tepid support for this telemedicine? Iowa is hardly known for its reproductive rights crusaders, but I argue that this issue should be solved not by applying the idea of pluralism but by referral to the interpretation of the Bill of Rights that originally impacted the Roe v. Wade decision. Dr. Vanessa Cullins’ claim that “They are not really protesting the new technology [but rather…] abortion in general” is absolutely true. Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee won the original case thanks to the Fourteenth Amendment; limiting a woman’s right to choose challenges such extension of the due process clause and, given that telemedicine is accepted for other uses, is both hypocritical and unconstitutional. The Internet-assisted administration of RU-486 should be treated no differently than that of, say, Singulair. And in the case of medical abortions, patients seem to receive more care, not less—and the public can hardly argue against that.