New Hampshire Abortion Legislation Mandates Health Misinformation and Threatens Doctors’ Safety

The latest salvo against abortion comes from the New Hampshire House of Representatives, who have passed a bill requiring, among other things, that women be told that there is “a direct link between abortion and breast cancer”. Using the worst of pseudo scientific logic, the writers of the bill start with an accepted fact – that pregnancy lowers breast cancer risk – and then proceed to weave a theory linking abortion to breast cancer that, to the lay reader, might sound quite scientific,  but in fact makes no sense given what we actually know about hormones and pregnancy.  There is no link between abortion and breast cancer – this has been shown in multiple well-done scientific studies.

An even more concerning aspect of the bill that has not received much press coverage is that doctors must certify that they gave women the educational materials and that the number of certifications a doctor has submitted is to be made available to the public. The fanatic and violent anti-abortion crowd would love to get their hands on a comprehensive list of every doctor out there performing abortions, and with this law, they would get it in New Hampshire.  This bill is a direct threat to the safety of doctors who provide abortions in new Hampshire, and is clearly designed to intimidate them.

The woman who introduced the bill also claimed that birth control pills cause prostate cancer via environmental contamination by hormones. There is no proof of such a claim.

This bill has passed the New Hampshire House, but not the  Senate. The good news is that New Hampshire’s governor is expected to veto the bill if the Senate passes it. But if I lived in New Hampshire, I wouldn’t count on my governor’s veto. I’d be calling and emailing and writing both my state senator and my governor, and telling everyone I know in New Hampshire to do the same.