Reference no: EM133333214
Case Study: Abortion informed consent laws have been the subject of much political and scholarly debate. These state laws require physicians to communicate information that may be scientifically inaccurate or medically irrelevant to patients seeking abortions. The primary issue of concern among legal scholars is whether these informed consent requirements are constitutional under the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Scholars of health law, public policy, medicine, and medical ethics have also turned their attention to abortion informed consent laws. Many have argued that the disclosures required by these laws are inconsistent with the ethical and legal principles of informed consent. By imposing additional requirements, state legislatures are co-opting medical practice for political goals. Recent tort scholarship questions whether state-specific compelled speech requirements might spill over to modify the medical standard of care nationwide. In this Article, I consider a different issue at the intersection of compelled speech and tort law. Rather than focusing primarily on the substantive content of legislatively mandated abortion disclosures, I highlight the ways in which these laws may undermine the fundamental procedural requirements of tort litigation. Every first-year law student is taught that the elements of negligence are duty, breach, cause, in fact, proximate causation, and damages. However, these foundational elements are called into question by laws that compel physicians to communicate state-mandated information about abortion and punish them for failing to do so, even in the absence of proof that there was a causal relationship between breach and injury. Certainly, legislatures can reject common law tort principles and craft their own standards for liability. However, the abandonment of actual and proximate causation as elements of an informed consent claim in the abortion context has broader implications for negligence law generally. These laws set a dangerous precedent by allowing legislatures to dismantle the fundamental elements of tort liability in order to achieve political and ideological goals.
Questions: From the article summary above;
1. describe the legal considerations it raises.
2. describe the ethical considerations it raises.
3. Recommend actions healthcare leaders should take to address these considerations.