Are Doctors Just Body Mechanics?

All abortion procedures are invasive. Certain abortion procedures require surgery. Cuomo’s Reproductive Health Act (RHA) is so radical that it reduces quality of care for women by allowing lower level medical providers to perform risky surgical procedures. Allowing non-physicians to provide surgery (say nothing of non-surgeon physicians) serves only to reduce quality of care for women, not enhance reproductive health.

According to the RHA a woman will be able to obtain an abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, representing higher-risk procedures, which have greater chance of complications, infection, and death. Fully licensed physicians in good standing are trained specifically for managing the condition of patients in potentially dangerous developments. Eliminating the requirement of physicians to perform these procedures increases the likelihood of life-altering and deadly complications for the woman.

Allowing non-physicians to perform an abortion ignores the overall health and well-being of the patient. Medicine is an art. It is the most humane of the humanities and most unscientific of the sciences. Physicians are trained to manage the entire scope of a patient’s health and well-being, employing this art. Lower-level providers are trained in technical skill, not the art of medicine. To employ lower-level providers in the performance of a single procedure virtually ignores the patient altogether. Allowing anyone to treat a patient around abortion alone disrespects the profession of medicine and the patient, treating her as an object to be manipulated—as a mechanic would a car.

Allowing non-physicians to perform surgery makes medicine what it is not. It reduces medicine to a set of impersonal skills to be applied to manipulate biochemical reactions. In so doing, it reduces the good purpose of medicine from the lofty heights of protecting the dignity of each individual to the meaninglessness of heartless, evidence-based, widget-turning, economically motivated population management. No thanks.

If legislators really cared about increasing the quality of care for women in reproductive health they would ensure that only board certified OB/GYNs in good standing could perform these complicated, risky procedures, instead of reducing the qualifications for practitioners.