The Texas Democrats are to be commended for their stand against Delay and his redistricting plan. Unfortunately, their return allowed this stinker to go through.
Why would you need to legislate that? If abortion leads to an increased risk of breast cancer, then medical ethics would require us to tell women this before the procedure, as an element of informed consent.
The problem is that it isn’t true.
This article from the Ameican Cancer Society is a pretty good overview of the topic, from an organization whose bias would lead it to play up and prevent any potential risk factors for cancer. The data just aren’t there to support the assertion. Telling women that an abortion puts them at an increased risk of breast cancer is a flat-out lie; you could just as easily tell them that it leads to an increased risk of colon cancer, or glioblastoma multiforme, or gout.
Pro-life groups only undermine their efforts with dishonest tactics like this. I can only hope that the people who do this required informing will let their patients know that it is required by the state, and that the evidence does not support the assertion at all.
Diogenes - yes, I could see some doing just that, but it still seems to introduce way too much confusion into an already sensitive and tricky situation.
Are the patients expected to believe a doctor that they have probably never met before over the majority opinion of the representatives elected to protect their interests?
Anyway, this wouldn’t be the first time legislators have tried to pass laws attempting to make an untruth the legal standard. Until the famous Scopes trial, it was required to teach creationism, and illegal to teach evolution in schools in some states.
I agree with QED about trusting a doctor over a politician. Politicians are like used car salesmen, I basically just assume that they’re lying until they prove otherwise.
Scopes lost. His conviction was later reversed by the TN supreme court on the technicality that his fine should have been set by the jury and not the judge, but the law banning the teaching of evolution remained on the books and enforceable until all such laws were struck down by SCOTUS in 1968.
I suspect that the “may lead to breast cancer” will provide enough wobble to get it past any review. Very little in biology, and especially in epidemiology, can be said with 100% certainty, so an interested party can always point to that nonzero chance and say “See! It could be true!” You can always claim that more studies may eventually reveal a link, even though as the studies have become larger and better it has become more clear that no link exists.
It’s also very easy to skew the results of various studies over the years to make it look, to a layman, like a link exists. Many organizations out there (with countless web sites) exist solely for that purpose. It takes some skill and some work to be able to reliably separate wheat from chaff when it comes to medical literature.
You seemed to be implying that it was after the Scopes trial that he teaching of evolution became legal. Sorry if that wasn’t what you were saying or if I missed the point.
The same legislature that recently decided to require me and thousands of other physicians licensed in Texas, to take continuing education coursework in medical ethics.
Sorry, but you can’t have it both ways. Medical ethics will require informing the patient that their government is lying to them.
All I was trying to say is that the US government has shown itself to be not unwilling to legislate demonstrable falsehoods, using an example most people would be familiar with. I suppose I could have been more clear on the issue, but there it is.
While the Scopes trial was a legal loss, it was the beginning of the end for keeping evolution out of schools. Darrow’s withering cross examination of Bryan on the the stand was a huge embarrasment for creationists and went a long way towards changing public opinion about the literal view of Genesis.
DoctorJ, are you aware of any other states in which this is happening? My future MIL is both conservative and not the most medically-trusting (“I don’t put much stock in X-rays”) person, so I can totally see her swallowing this type of thing wholesale. She’s already lectured her daughter more than once about the danger of obesity (my fiancee is nothing close to obese, and in no danger of becoming so) and its specific link to diabetes (which I’ve heard people talk about but IIRC there’s nothing special about diabetes that puts it ahead of, say, heart disease in the List of Bad Things About Being Incredibly Overweight).
I don’t know about other states, but I do know that a nutjob named Tim Philpot who used to be a legislator in KY and who made a name for himself by setting up cameras outside our local porn shops to record who came in and out tried to introduce a similar measure there several years ago. I don’t think it passed.
And yes, obesity itself can exacerbate or even cause diabetes. I saw two patients last week, one of whom suddenly developed diabetes when he gained 100 pounds in six months, and one of whom cured his diabetes when he lost 150 pounds in three years. Of course, not all diabetics are obese, and not all obese people are diabetic, but there is a very specific link. Hey, a broken clock is right twice a day.
Cured?? I tell my diabetics we have no real cure thus far except for pancreas transplants in type I diabetics. But some fortunate diabetics may need no medication at all and run normal blood sugars if they exercise, lose weight, and eat right.
But generally I think we do a disservice if we tell people their diabetes can be cured. The fundamental mechanics of glucose intolerance and insulin resistance remain in place even with well-controlled diabetics, and their glucose tolerance tests will still be abnormal.
Anyway, back to the topic!
What is bitterly ironic to me is the fact that while our current conservative government is extremely resistant to real health-care reform at least partly on the basis of reducing “more governmental intrusion into medicine”, they do not hesitate to increase the intrusion where reproductive rights are involved.
“If you choose to have an abortion your risk of breast cancer will be slightly higher than if you choose to have the baby, but will be the same as if you had never got pregnant in the first place. Having an abortion will return you to the risk you had before you got pregnant.”
It’s pretty much the truth, and fulfills the letter of the law, if not the spirit.
