Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 21, 1992 TAG: 9203210225
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
The decision, announced Friday in a memorandum governing the federal Family Planning Program and sent to regional offices of the Public Health Service, does not lift the prohibition on abortion counseling for nurses or other non-physician health-care personnel.
The long-awaited new guidelines, which will apply to clinics nationwide that receive money from the Health and Human Services Department, will give doctors discretion to tell women that abortion is an option even for non-medical reasons, officials said.
But the new rules, officials stressed, were not designed to encourage doctors to "advise abortion on the basis of social conditions."
The memorandum, however, bars discussion or counseling on abortion by nurses, social workers and other clinic personnel. In practice, these workers, rather than doctors, provide the vast majority of counseling to all types to women coming into clinics for information on contraception, pregnancy prevention and other matters.
The new rules provide a narrow exception to a policy dating from 1988 that prohibits clinic personnel from giving any advice about abortion. The policy, vehemently opposed by many medical groups for interfering with confidential doctor-patient relationships, survived a Supreme Court test last May. Both houses of Congress voted to lift the counseling ban, but were unable to override a veto by President Bush.
The memorandum is designed to carry out a Nov. 5 pledge from Bush that Reagan administration rules seeking to curb abortion referrals and counseling at federally funded clinics would not "prevent a woman from receiving complete information from a physician."
By limiting the new counseling rules to physicians, who handle very few patients, the rule has the effect of tightly limiting any abortion counseling in the clinics, anti-abortion and abortion-rights groups agreed Friday.
For that reason, the National Right to Life Committee praised the memorandum, but the Planned Parenthood Federation of America criticized it sharply.
Douglas Johnson, legislative director of National Right to Life, said that the memorandum is "fully consistent" with the organization's desire to prohibit federally funded clinics from routinely referring women to abortion clinics.
"Very little of the abortion counseling has been done by physicians," he said.
Sally Patterson, vice president of Planned Parenthood, said, "The narrow exception for physicians in the guidelines is of no use to the millions of low-income women who depend on other medical professionals for their reproductive health care."
But Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue, a radical anti-abortion group, said in a statement that by Friday's action Bush "has revealed just how weak his pro-life commitment really is."
by CNB