For two years now, Planned Parenthood of the Heartland (PPH), one of Planned Parenthood's more aggressive affiliates, has been offering chemical abortions via webcam at several of its clinics where no doctor is physically present.

Dr. Randall K. O’Bannon

On Friday, October 22nd, the Des Moines Register reports (10/23/10), Jennifer Bowen, the executive director of Iowa Right to Life, joined with several others who appeared before the Iowa Board of Medicine arguing that the web-cam setup violated state law requiring that all abortions be performed by a physician. Bowen presented the board with a petition bearing 3,900 signatures asking that the board "Stop Web-cam Abortions in Iowa."

Over 1,500 women have used the web-cam abortion system in Iowa since its inception, the Register reports.

Despite the pleas of a dozen speakers opposed to the practice (no one there defended web-cam abortions), the board chose not to act, telling the Des Moines Register the general issue of "telemedicine" remained under study. An Iowa Board of Medicine ad hoc committee has been, the paper says, "looking into what other states are doing."

The Iowa board's legal director called telemedicine "a very complex legal issue" that is evolving, the Register reported, and noted its use in radiology and psychiatry.

Defenders of the practice have tried to argue that the physician fulfills his duty by counseling the woman over the internet (RHRealityCheck, 8/23/10), but this ignores how significantly different chemical abortions are from a radiologist's reading of an x-ray or some electronic psychoanalysis.

A radiologist typically shares his recommendation with another doctor treating the patient, determining whether that doctor, there treating the patient in the hospital or his or her office, will provide a splint or cast or surgery. If psychotherapy is limited to counseling sessions and the prescription of medication, this could perhaps be handled by web-cam, but no one is going to be asked to do their own brain surgery over the internet.

Women having chemical abortions will endure significant pain and bleeding, even when things go as planned. Complications like hemorrhage are common, and deadly infections have taken the lives of several chemical abortion patients in the ten years since RU486 was approved in the U.S.

Those are hardly the sort of things that can be treated over a web-cam.

Perhaps the Iowa Board of Medicine should remember that the physician's first duty is to "do no harm."

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