Physician Duties When Law Restricts Reproductive Health Care

Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, physicians may find their professional obligations to care for patients in conflict with state laws restricting reproductive health care. For nearly 50 years, Roe v. Wade protected a pregnant person's right to terminate a pregnancy in the United States. But since Dobbs, state legislatures have adopted laws to govern abortion and reproductive care. A number of states ban or severely restrict abortion. This may hamper provision of urgent medical care even in cases of miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy. Cases have been reported of women dying for lack of needed care. In some states, laws requiring treatment of embryos or fetuses as persons may also challenge physicians’ ability to provide IVF and other infertility treatment.

With this shift in the legal landscape, physicians and other clinicians are left to grapple with laws that may create obstacles to necessary medical treatment. They worry that the tightening of abortion rules in some states will lead to more pregnancy-related deaths across the nation due to legal uncertainty. And people in marginalized groups are particularly at risk, according to researchers. Doctors are asking: When do professional ethics and personal conscience outweigh state prohibitions? Law has long permitted individual physicians to decline participation in abortion due to conscientious objection, but should law also protect physicians’ conscientious provision of needed reproductive health care?

We’ve assembled three experts on the frontlines of this difficult health care issue to discuss this conflict between law, ethics, and medicine. Join the Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment & the Life Sciences for this timely webinar!

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The webinar is free and open to the public.