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doi: 10.1111/jlme.12192pmid: 25846035
<jats:p>As states increasingly impose informed consent mandates on abortion providers, the required disclosures bring two well-established legal doctrines into conflict — the First Amendment’s freedom of speech and the physician’s duty to obtain informed consent.</jats:p><jats:p>On one hand, the First Amendment provides for a broad freedom of speech, under which government may neither prevent people from voicing their own views, nor compel individuals to voice the government’s views. As the Supreme Court observed in <jats:italic>Wooley v. Maynard</jats:italic>, the First Amendment protects “both the right to speak freely and the right to refrain from speaking at all.” When legislatures tell physicians what they must disclose to their patients, the physicians lose their right not to speak.</jats:p>
Flynn, Cameron O'Brien; Wilson, Robin Fretwell
doi: 10.1111/jlme.12197pmid: 25846040
<jats:p>State law efforts to regulate abortions have accelerated. Between 2011 and 2013, state legislatures enacted 205 abortion laws — 16 more than in the entire decade before. Most laws take direct aim at surgical abortions, although some also target chemical abortions that use drugs like RU-486, a common chemical abortifacient sold under the trade name Mifeprex.</jats:p><jats:p>A crop of new state laws focus on the subject of this Symposium, that is, what information abortion providers must give women about the procedures or drugs they seek. In the most controversial iteration of these “informed consent” statutes, abortion providers must “perform an ultrasound on each wom[a]n seeking an abortion and…show and describe the image” (the “speech and display provisions”). Some state laws regulating chemical abortions also force particular disclosures to women when receiving such drugs.</jats:p>
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