The abortion debate in America is a festering collection of sore points so putrescent with bitterness that if it was a leg you would have it amputated. It has given birth to many ill-conceived attempts by politicians to pursue the anti-abortion argument into the doctor’s office, including attempts this year in the legislatures of Maine and several other states.

LD 25 is a bill in Maine’s legislative hopper loftily titled An Act To Educate Women on the Medical Risks Associated With Abortion. It would more appropriately be titled An Attempt to Convince Women Not to Have an Abortion by Scaring the Bejeesus Out of Them and Making Them Feel Guilty. It is legislative Fear Factor.

The bill specifically requires a physician tell a woman considering abortion that the procedure may lead to “perforated uterus, hemorrhage, death, incompetent cervix, retained fetal parts after abortion, grief, sense of loss, anger, depression, alienation and low self-esteem.” It then imposes a 24-hour waiting period after the woman is told of the risks before she can have the procedure. It also requires the doctor to tell the woman of the “probable gestational age and anatomical development of the fetus at the time of the scheduled abortion.” No other medical procedure performed in Maine is the subject of such a specific law on informing patients about risk of complication.

The bill is clearly designed by abortion foes to intimidate women, not to inform them. Otherwise, if physicians were not doing an adequate job of informing patients before elective abortions, the current law requiring them to inform patients of the risks of all procedures, including abortion, would simply be strengthened. Otherwise, LD 25 would also require physicians to also inform women that abortion’s alternatives, pregnancy and childbirth, place women at much higher risk of the same complications. Otherwise, the bill would address the risks of much more dangerous procedures than abortion.

For example, if the bill’s authors were really concerned about patients being informed, the bill would require doctors to tell women:

. that the risk of death from pregnancy and childbirth is more than nine times higher than the risk of death from legal abortion;

. that pregnancy and childbirth after the age of 40 carry a risk of maternal death four times higher than the risk for a woman of 25;

. that an allergic reaction to penicillin is two times more likely to cause a woman’s death than a legal abortion;

. that only in the context of other risks can a patient really understand the relative risks of abortion.

If the bill was really intended to educate instead of intimidate it would require doctors not simply to tell women of the complication risks, but how substantial the risks are. The real story, however, would probably not dissuade many women from having an abortion, because serious complication of any kind after elective abortion is unusual.

“Abortion is among the safest procedures in contemporary practice,” according to a recent review in the Annals of Internal Medicine. For example, while some women have second thoughts after abortion and may experience a sense of loss or regret, few suffer significant long-term emotional distress after having an abortion. Incompetent cervix as a complication of routine abortion is rare, and occurs far less frequently after abortion than after the passing of a newborn through the cervix during routine childbirth. If the bill requires physicians to present the specter of abortion’s risks without requiring them to describe how small those risks are it really legislates potential misinformation, not complete information.

The bill’s prescribed 24-hour waiting period is another attempt to dissuade women from having the procedure. It implies women have abortions without really thinking first, a presumption that is condescending and usually wrong. There is little evidence that waiting periods change women’s decisions, since most women have walked the gantlet of their options and emotions before talking to a physician about an abortion. In addition, more than half of women who have an abortion already have a child, so they are not strangers to the alternative of motherhood.

The purpose of the proposed delay within the context of the bill seems clear; scare the woman with the risk conversation, make her feel guilty about the fetus, then tell her to go home and think about her guilt and fear for 24 hours in the hope she will come to a different conclusion. And in some communities the two visits to the doctor LD 25 would require mean the patient has to make two trips back and forth past a gantlet of anti-abortion protesters outside.

LD 25 and similar bills are part of a national pattern of using scare tactics to dissuade women from having elective abortions. The use of this tactic has, for example, perpetuated the myth that abortion increases a woman’s risk of breast cancer. The National Institutes of Health and the World Health Organization have both studied and repudiated this purported connection, showing an abortion does not increase a woman’s risk of breast cancer. Despite that, the mythical link remains the big boogeyman in the closet for abortion rights foes, and laws similar to LD 25 in two states even require physicians to tell women that having an abortion will increase their breast cancer risk.

That a law claiming to be in the best interests of patients would be used to force physicians in those other states to promulgate this breast cancer myth is appalling, but serves the purpose of exposing the risks of complication from LD 25 and its real purpose of scaring rather than informing. The proposed Maine law would open the door for legislative majorities with no medical evidence or training to add or remove purported abortion risks at the whim of the majority and its pro- or anti-abortion bias. That is poor law and poor medicine.

Finally, the proposed law is a deliberate attempt to force the anti-abortion argument into the doctor’s office, to make the doctor an agent of the abortion choice foes, and to intervene in a woman’s decision about abortion during her private conversation with her physician. The only way the bill could invade the woman’s and physician’s privacy more completely would be if it required the physician to be at the bedside warning about the risks of abortion while the woman was having sex.

Regardless of one’s position on abortion choice, none of us should be supporting government-mandated use of misinformation, scare tactics and guilt in the physician’s office to influence a woman’s decision about abortion. LD 25 and similar laws abuse legislative power, abort patient privacy and miscarry the concept of informed patient consent. They should never see the light of day.

Erik Steele, D.O., a physician in Bangor, is chief medical officer of Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems and is on the staff of several hospital emergency rooms in the region.