Newswire

Georgia Abortion Providers Less Vexed

Doctors who provide abortions still oppose a bill before the General Assembly, but they welcome changes approved last week — including one allowing physicians to keep performing first-trimester abortions in their offices.

Physician groups and state officials don't know how many doctors perform such abortions, outside of hospitals and the nine state-licensed abortion clinics. But authorities say many do. Abortion rights activists say the service is especially vital in rural areas far removed from the clinics.

"It's an extremely important service," said Dr. Joel Engel, who said he performs a few abortions a year, on his regular patients, at Northside Hospital but none in his Atlanta office. "Shouldn't women, who already agonize over this decision, be able to have it done by their own doctor, whom they know and trust?"

Anti-abortion activists will try again to curb office-performed abortions in future legislation, said Pat Chivers, a lobbyist for Georgia Right to Life.

The existing bill, approved Thursday by a House committee, is expected to go before the full House this week. It would require a 24-hour waiting period for abortions after women receive information on fetal pain, fetal development and alternatives to abortion such as adoption.

It also would require a minor's parents or legal guardian to be notified before she could have an abortion. Current law says a stand-in, such as a grandparent or other relative, can be given notice.

Abortion providers still decry those stipulations, saying they would interfere with their medical practice and cause more later-term abortions by making it more difficult for women to get them. They also oppose increased record keeping required by the bill.

But the doctors say they are relieved other requirements were removed. One would have made them tell women that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer, a link disputed by the National Cancer Institute. Another would have allowed the husband or parents of a woman seeking an abortion to sue a doctor for failing to provide information required by the bill.

"It's still a big imposition," Dr. Carrie Cwiak of Emory University, who performs abortions at Grady Memorial Hospital and Feminist Women's Health Center in Atlanta, said of the revised bill. "It's just not as ridiculous an imposition."

One of the biggest victories for abortion rights activists was the removal from the bill — by its sponsor, Rep. Sue Burmeister (R-Augusta) — of the requirement that doctors providing first-trimester abortions do so only at hospitals or clinics. Physicians performing abortions in their offices offer surgical abortions without anesthesia or medication-induced abortions using the pill RU-486.

The state does not have a record of how many doctors provide such abortions, said Demetrius Parker, a spokesman for the Georgia Division of Public Health. But he confirmed that hundreds of the 30,000 or so abortions reported in Georgia each year are performed by doctors in counties without abortion clinics. Six of the clinics are in metro Atlanta, with one each in Augusta, Columbus and Savannah.

Engel, who is on the board of Planned Parenthood of Georgia, said more than half of the state's 850 or so obstetrician/gynecologists perform abortions, many of them in their offices. "But less than 1 percent will acknowledge it," he said. "They don't want to discuss it. They're afraid."

Dr. John Moore, president of the Atlanta OB/GYN Society and former president of its Georgia counterpart, estimated that about 25 percent of the doctors perform abortions — less than 15 percent in their offices.

But Moore said restricting office-performed abortions would have a big impact. "It would certainly hurt women in small towns and rural areas where they don't have a clinic," he said.

While abortion rights activists applauded most changes to the bill, they were suspicious of one: a definition of "fetus" as a "member of the species homo sapiens from fertilization until birth."

Intrauterine devices, emergency contraception pills such as Plan B and other birth control measures sometimes work by preventing implantation in the uterus of eggs already fertilized. Some worry that the new definition of fetus could lead to birth control restrictions.

Chivers, of Georgia Right to Life, said the definition of fetus was added because it fits with what other states, such as Pennsylvania, have adopted.

Chivers said anti-abortion activists were not happy losing some provisions in the bill. But "compromises are part of the process," she said. "We're satisfied with it and ready for it to go to the House."


http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/me
tro/legis05/0205/21legabortion.html

Posted by Editor at February 21, 2005 07:20 AM