The Massachusetts Medical Society is grateful to elected leaders across the Commonwealth for their commitment to ensuring access to reproductive health care. Commitment to science-based policy helps ensure that care decisions remain in the hands of medical professionals and their patients. Most recently, Attorney General Andrea Campbell has shown commendable leadership in standing up to politically motivated attempts to undermine access to reproductive health care.
It is concerning that in an effort to restrict abortion access, federal officials are citing a deeply flawed study on mifepristone, an abortion medication drug widely and safely prescribed since it earned FDA approval in 2000. Its safety and efficacy is supported by decades of clinical use and a substantial body of rigorous, peer-reviewed research.
The study being leveraged to push for an FDA review of mifepristone lacks universally recognized methodology, has not been peer-reviewed, and has not been published in a medical journal.
When flawed research is used to inform policy or legal action, the consequences are not theoretical. They are felt by real patients and real physicians. Such restrictions will not improve patient safety. They will only create more barriers to care that harm patients.
Another strategy in the multi-faceted attempt to restrict access to medically appropriate reproductive care is the administration’s recent revocation of guidance related to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act — a longstanding law that has required hospitals to provide stabilizing treatment, including abortion care, to patients with emergency medical conditions. This action, already a reality in some states, is inherently dangerous. Patients in crisis may delay or avoid care altogether. Physicians and hospitals will be forced to weigh legal exposure against their clinical judgment in life-and health-saving medical decisions.
In Massachusetts, we have both the opportunity and the obligation to act. Legislation filed by Sen. Cindy Friedman and Attorney General Campbell would strengthen the state’s Shield Law to protect patients and providers from out-of-state legal interference.
It is imperative that we safeguard and fortify access to abortion in the face of these serious threats. The Massachusetts Medical Society urges every legislator to support this bill and to pass it into law. In doing so, we can send a clear message that in Massachusetts, we will continue to protect the sanctity of the physician-patient relationship and access to evidence-based care, modeling the principle that health care is a human right.
-Olivia Liao, MD, President, Massachusetts Medical Society
