Golden votes ‘no’ on bill that threatened abortion providers with prison time

WASHINGTON — Congressman Jared Golden (ME-02) today voted “no” on HR 21, legislation to politicize women’s health care, interfere with family-provider medical decisions and threaten doctors and nurses for providing life-saving legal reproductive health care. 

“This bill is not based in reality. It is a solution in search of a problem,” Golden said. “What’s worse, it threatened to send medical professionals to prison for exercising their medical judgment, even to save a woman’s life. This bill targets doctors and nurses providing care during one of the most complex and heartbreaking scenarios a pregnant woman could encounter: the choice of having to end care when life-threatening and dangerous complications arise in a pregnancy. The House should not be in the business of threatening doctors and nurses or substituting extreme anti-choice ideology for qualified medical decision-making.”

HR 21 would require medical practitioners to provide “the same degree of professional skill, care and diligence” for a living child delivered during an attempted abortion — just as they would during normal childbirth. It threatened providers with stiff fines and up to five years in prison if they were found to have violated its myriad and untenable requirements. 

Infanticide is already illegal in the United States, and providers are already required to provide care in the extremely rare case that a child is born alive during an attempted abortion. 

When the House passed the bill last year, The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists called it “another cruel and misguided attempt to interfere with evidence-based medical decision making between patients and their physicians. … Laws that ban or criminalize evidence-based care and rely on medically unsupported theories and misinformation are dangerous to families and their clinicians. This bill negatively affects all obstetric and gynecologic care.”

In opposition to the bill, the American Civil Liberties Union wrote: “This bill imposes a rigid set of requirements on health care providers that entirely disregards providers’ professional training and judgment, as well as patient preferences and established medical standards. … One provision is so vaguely worded that it is unclear what it actually requires of providers — and yet, these requirements are coupled with the threat of serious criminal penalties, including up to five years in prison, for those who do not comply. … H.R. 21 would substitute a physician’s best judgment with that of politicians, interfering with physicians’ ability to provide appropriate, compassionate, evidence- based care. It must be rejected.”

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