Health and Reproductive Justice
Informed Consent
Legal Voice Fights for All Patients' Rights to Complete and Accurate Health Care Information
Depending upon where you receive your medical care, your health care provider may not be able to give you all the information you need to make an informed health care decision. In some circumstances, your health care provider may refuse to perform certain medical services either because of faith-based religious restrictions imposed upon them or because of their own religious or moral beliefs. Such restrictions have a profound effect on women's access to health care—and often women don't even realize it. In other instances, women are coerced to consent to health care interventions, such as caesarian births, that are not always medically necessary and carry health risks.
What does lack of informed consent mean to you?
It means that your elderly parent's end-of-life wishes may not be honored at the local hospital; it means that your obstetrician may not be able to perform the tubal ligation you want after delivering your baby and you may not even know it; it means that your physician may refuse to provide fertility services to you because of religious doctrine or a belief that your family is morally unacceptable; it means that you may have to deliver your baby by C-section even when you don't want to or risk a hospital refusing to help you during labor and delivery. Read Senior Legal Counsel Sara Ainsworth's September 4, 2008 op-ed column on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer website in response to the August 22, 2008 P-I report regarding Washington's extraordinarily high rate of Caesarean-section deliveries.
What is Legal Voice doing about this problem?
We're working hard to ensure that patients receive complete and accurate health care information. We believe that patients have the right to know, in advance, of any religiously-based policies that would restrict their ability to receive medical information or services. We all deserve to get complete, accurate, and unbiased medical advice without interference from religious doctrine or an individual provider's moral beliefs. And we believe that women should be able to make decisions about their health care without coercion.
We want to hear from you. Contact us if you or someone you know has been denied health care or coerced by hospital policies into undergoing a procedure she did not want.
Women's rights. Nothing less.
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