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Just How Private Are Your Private Medical Records?Specifically, when can someone else, who sues your doctor, obtain your records? According to the decision the Ohio Supreme Court issued today (PDF) in Roe v. Planned Parenthood Southwest Ohio Region only under specific and limited circumstances. In this case, John and June Roe claimed that a Planned Parenthood clinic had improperly provided their teenage daughter with an abortion. With the financial support of the Life Legal Defense Foundation, their lawyers filed the suit, and then, in a court process called "discovery," demanded that Planned Parenthood turn over the medical records of all the minor patients the clinic had seen over a 10-year period. The Roes were willing, however, to receive the records with personally identifying information "redacted" — essentially blacked out with a Sharpie. The ACLU became involved to help stop this potential invasion of medical privacy. When the Roes' attempt to obtain the private medical records reached the Ohio Supreme Court, we filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the Ohio Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics; the Ohio Academy of Family Physicians; the Society for Adolescent Medicine; the National Association of Social Workers; the National Center for Youth Law; the Center for Adolescent Health & the Law; the Ohio NOW Education and Legal Fund; the Ohio Domestic Violence Network; ACTION OHIO Coalition for Battered Women; Break the Cycle; and Women Empowered Against Violence, Inc. As our brief explained, these organizations entered the case to protect the minors whose records were at stake in the case, who were never asked for and never gave their permission for anyone to see their medical records, and who therefore had no opportunity to object to this violation of their privacy. Our brief argued that disclosure of the records — even in redacted form — would undermine minors' confidence that their reproductive medical information would be kept private, and thereby drive them away from seeking this critical care. In today's ruling (PDF), the court made the important point that the records would not lose their privileged (private) status simply by being redacted. Those who seek to harass and deter providers of abortion care will not stop, but today's ruling is a victory for the medical privacy and medical wellbeing of minors in Ohio.
The 4th Circuit Upholds the Law: Carhart is Not Carte BlancheLast week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Va., struck down a law — the “Partial Birth Infanticide Act” — that would have made it virtually impossible for doctors to perform second-trimester abortions in the state regardless of whether a woman’s health was threatened. If the law sounds familiar, it should. It is yet another iteration of the federal “Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act” that the U.S. Supreme Court misguidedly upheld last year in Gonzales v. Carhart. Like the federal law, Virginia’s fails to include any exceptions to protect women’s health. But as last week’s court held, the Virginia law goes even further than the federal ban, which proved to be its fatal constitutional flaw. While the Supreme Court’s decision in Carhart dealt a devastating blow to women’s health, reproductive rights, and equality, last week’s decision (PDF) shows that there are still limits to how far politicians can go in passing new and far-reaching abortion restrictions. Notably, this was the second federal appeals court to find a state ban too extreme in light of Carhart. In June of last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit struck down Michigan’s third attempt at an abortion methods ban, the Legal Birth Definition Act. That law would have banned the most commonly used abortion methods in the first and second trimesters. In its ruling, the court held that the Michigan language “pushed almost every boundary that the Supreme Court has imposed for these types of laws.” We are gratified to see that even in the post-Carhart world, there are limits to how far legislatures can go in disregarding women’s health and reproductive freedom. The Fourth and Sixth Circuits understand that last year's Carhart decision — as devastating as it was — does not give states carte blanche to eliminate nearly all second-trimester abortion care. It is our hope that legislators in Virginia, Michigan, and all across the country will take note of these important rulings and put an end to their on-going attempts to interfere in a woman’s most personal and private medical decisions. |
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