If your parent/court appointed guardian didn’t consent, then you were a victim of medical battery, at least. And that’s not metaphorical. But if we take it back to the Illinois statute and pretend again that it doesn’t excuse medical professionals, it seems to be just as much sexual assault, yes. But peds is weird when it comes to consents. You can’t refuse, and while they will seek consents from your parent/guardian, if the situation is determined dire by a physician, they won’t allow them to refuse for long, either.
But yeah, good example if we raise the age. Enemas require consent. There are some bowel procedures which they want to have a enema before. They’ll tell you it’s needed. But if you say no, they’ll find another way to clean you out, because an enema isn’t the only way to do it. It might be the best way, the preferred way, but there’s other ways. So chug your Go-Lytely instead of taking the enema. (Personally, I’d take the enema.) And you and I, as adults, have the right to refuse that enema while still receiving the colonoscopy or bowel resection. They may explain that we’re stupid idiots for not taking the enema because of the potential for infection, and we’re risking the doctor beginning the procedure and not being able to complete it and having to reschedule for another try - but it’s still our right to refuse only that part of the treatment. (It’s also a doctor’s right to refuse to do the procedure on you, if she is of the professional medical opinion that it’s not possible to do safely it another way.)
So, bring it on back now: Even if a transvaginal ultrasound were far and away the *best *way to estimate gestational age (and studies have been mixed on that front), there are other ways, ways that are sufficient for patient safety, if not legislative zeal. Women should be able to refuse transvaginal and opt for another option, (like fundus height by palpation and date of last menstrual period.) Even the need to pinpoint gestational age is itself a political (and now legal) need. Used to be that before we had transvaginal transducers (introduced in the late 1990’s), we realized that if we were a week off the estimate, the sky didn’t fall. There is no bright line at 12 weeks that makes a clinic abortion unsafe from a medical perspective. 14 weeks is a little more justifiable, but only because the head at that stage tends to be too big for vacuum aspiration. We’ve decided in some states, despite a historically low complication rate, that a D&C is only safe in an office or clinic if it’s done for reasons *other *than an abortion, like to treat endometriosis or fibroids. Abortions magically require full hospital operating rooms and 10 foot hallways, even though they’re the same procedure. But, just like that bowel resection - if the doctor gets in there and can’t do the vacuum aspiration, she can stop and reschedule, or stop and use a different technique safely, if state law allows it.
The vital thing that these laws disallow her is professional judgement. There is no one-size-fits-all in medicine. There is always something to consider that can’t be reduced to a line item on a checklist. And that’s why we educate and license doctors. If it was as easy as pregnancy test–>transvaginal ultrasound–>vacuum aspiration, then we wouldn’t need doctors, we’d have vending machines. We value doctors for their training and skill and professional judgement, and that’s what these laws rip away from them, and reduce women to an amorphous non-entity, instead of individual people with individual histories, preferences and needs.
While I agree that it’s rather silly in real life, as opposed to a discussion on a message board, to consider it exactly-literally-rapey-McRaperson, I do think we need to be careful about how we handle the comparison. We need to not dismissively snort, “It’s NOT rape, doo-doo head!”, but instead consider why it raises the level of fear and anger that it does - a level of fear and anger that is at least on par with what date rape inspires. Dismissing it with a handwave and accusing people of not knowing what literally means just invites pedants like myself to pull up statutes to show that, actually, literally might be the literally correct word there. Am I right? Yeah. Is it relevent, in a thread debating whether it’s rape? Yeah. Is it important? Nope, outside of presenting a debate or potentially winning a lawsuit to overturn these laws, it’s not important, for reasons eloquently articulated by Manda Jo.
What’s important is getting these laws overturned, and restoring patient autonomy and protecting the doctor patient relationship.