Only one problem. The doctors and medical experts who testified found no safety concerns and the anti-choicers crushed the program anyway.
On Friday, Iowa’s Board of Medicine voted to eliminate the largest telemedicine abortion program in the country. That means doctors in the state won’t be allowed to use video technology to prescribe abortion-inducing drugs to rural and low-income women who don’t have the means to travel to the nearest clinic — even though they’ve been safely doing so for the past five years.
Planned Parenthood of the Heartland has been operating its telemedicine abortion program since 2008, and there’s no reason it should have come under any kind of particular scrutiny this summer. Studies have repeatedly found that it’s a safe method of delivering reproductive care, and patients are just as satisfied after speaking with a doctor over a video conference as they are after making an in-person trip to a clinic. Nonetheless, the Board of Medicine has been considering banning the practice for the past several months — and the Friday vote makes it official.
“This decision is a political attack aimed at restricting access to abortion in Iowa. Proponents of this rule aren’t against telemedicine technology; they are against safe, legal abortion and are unjustly targeting our system with no scientific information or evidence to back their claims,” Planned Parenthood of the Heartland’s president, Jill June, said in a statement.
Indeed, the telemedicine program was in effect for five years, three years in Iowa alone, helping some 3,000 women get safe first tri-mester abortions in clinics. When Gov. Branstad found out, he fired everyone on the Iowa Board of Medicine and replaced them with his own anti-choice cronies, including former state legislator and Republican anti-choicer Greg Hoversten as chairman.
The Medical Board chairman, Dr. Greg Hoversten, of Sioux City, also raised an issue with the fact that Iowa was among the very first states in the country to provide telemedicine abortion on a wide scale.
“That really bothers me that Iowa women are the first ones to get this in this fashion. There’s something wrong there. It just doesn’t seem right,” Hoversten said.
Except for the fact that the procedure was performed medically safely thousands of times in Iowa. The Iowa Medical Society called the ban "premature" and "that more analysis, more evaluation, more study , more discussion with the profession is important."
But it took all of three days for the anti-choicers on the Medical Board to kill a safe program they state legislation couldn't kill for years. It's not political, and it's not about cutting abortion access. Nope.
Never.
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