WV lawsuit against clinic a travesty

Charleston Gazette:
Baseless lawsuit a travesty

Two years ago, a right-wing group hoping to shut down one of West Virginia’s two pregnancy-termination clinics held a news conference to announce a lawsuit against the Charleston women’s facility and one of its doctors. Quickly, Republican Attorney General Patrick Morrisey cited the lawsuit as a reason to review regulations of such clinics.

It was all sham political theater — as Kanawha Circuit Judge Joanna Tabit made clear this week when she threw out the case. The lawsuit was nothing more than a sneaky attempt to interfere with women’s right to end pregnancies — a right granted by the U.S. Supreme Court more than four decades ago and upheld repeatedly by courts since then.

The woman involved in the suit, a heroin addict, said she suffered cramping and bleeding after visiting the Women’s Health Center on the West Side. She went to Charleston Area Medical Center, where she was seen by Dr. Byron Calhoun, vice chairman of the OB/GYN department at WVU Hospitals’ Charleston Division — and also medical advisor to a national pro-life group.

Calhoun said he thought he saw the skull of a fetus on an ultrasound — an emotional image guaranteed to stoke outrage — left in her uterus. Others didn’t find any such thing. A follow-up procedure at CAMC found no signs of any fetal remains inside her, according to the judge’s order. And Calhoun didn’t think enough of it to mention it to his patient at the time.

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Judge Tabit called Calhoun’s action remarkable. Other words would also apply. And if we were running the show at WVU Hospitals or CAMC, we might wonder if a high-ranking doctor with state government credentials was letting his personal beliefs intrude upon his professional judgment.

Dr. Calhoun was, of course, the star expert in the lawsuit filed by Dys. He warned of a list of maladies that the woman would face as the result of the allegedly botched abortion, including the inability to carry a child to full term. But the judge noted in her order that the woman had already done so by that time.

Other parts of the lawsuit were similarly inane. Calhoun testified that the doctor deviated from the national standard of care by not personally getting “informed consent” — even though, as the judge noted, state law explicitly allows doctors to delegate that responsibility to another health-care professional.

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As for the review of state clinic regulations that Morrisey started after the lawsuit, he got more than 10,000 pages worth of comments, and charged $2,500 for the public to obtain a copy of them. The women’s rights group WV Free analyzed the comments, and said the majority opposed Morrisey’s investigation.

The central question seems to be: Did instigators of this mess know that the fetal skull allegation had been disproven, yet they continued to assert that it was true? Was it done to promote their religio-political agenda?

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The willingness to lie and use deception to advance a self-righteous, religiously-based agenda to deprives women control of their reproductive health and options never ceases to amaze.

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