This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Michael H. Shapiro
University of Southern California Law Center Los Angeles

JAMA. 1990;264(2):183.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.—

There is a plausible legal and moral case for respecting a woman's decision to have an elective abortion and for protecting her conversations on that matter with her physician, as Annas and coworkers argue.¹ But referring to the decision as a "medical judgment" carries a risk of misunderstanding.

Although the authors observe that the abortion decision is a "moral decision," they invoke Roe v Wade's ill-advised remark that before viability "the abortion decision and its effectuation must be left to the medical judgment of the pregnant woman's attending physician."² This claim in Roe was unnecessary to the decision and reflects a conceptual error that eventually may produce a normative error, and it would have been well if Annas et al had clarified the meaning of "medical judgment." (Taken seriously, Roe's claim suggests the possibility of a veto by the physician, which is clearly . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?