Writing in USA Today, two Harvard Medical School professors urged doctors to civil disobedience over what they call "unprecedented and sweeping legal assault on women's reproductive rights."

The piece by doctors Marcia Angell and Michael Green of Harvard suprisingly begins with an argument against recent laws protecting doctors from "wrongful birth" lawsuits. Why? Because the two doctors seem to think that eeeevil pro-life doctors won't tell mothers if their babies in the womb aren't perfect in time to abort them.

Just think about that for a second. One could almost surmise that these doctors like abortions more than they dislike lawsuits. Greater love hath no doctor than willing to risk a lawsuit for laying down the life of a child, huh?

But it actually gets crazier from there. In a piece that's pretty much all about protecting the conscience rights of doctors, the two professors argue against conscience rights for people who aren't MD's.
<blockquote>Even more regressive than obstructing the right to abortion is the recent effort to block access to contraception. The current attempt to turn the clock back nearly a half-century is cloaked in high-flown rhetoric about the rights of employers and insurers to deny coverage for contraception if it violates their conscience (it also saves them money).

But employers and insurers are not doctors, and should not be permitted to decline to pay for a category of medical services that they disapprove of. Appealing to conscience does not change the fact that employers and insurers, regardless of their own beliefs, do not belong in decisions about what constitutes good medical care.</blockquote>But nobody's talking about denying medical care, we're talking about religious freedom from the government forcing Catholic institutions to pay for contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilization procedures.

Ironically Dr. Angell, in a piece praising a physician-assisted suicide bill, makes it clear that "doctors will not be required to comply." But if it is important to doctors not to be mandated to take part in the intentional death of others, why would it be O.K. to mandate that Catholic institutions take part in the intentional death of the unborn through abortifacients?

I guess freedom of religion only applies to doctors?

But then the two docs really get to the meat of their argument which is that doctors should ignore all these eeeeevil pro-life laws.
<blockquote>Physicians, both as individuals and as a profession, should stand with their patients. They should make it clear that they will not perform procedures, such as ultrasound examinations, unless they are medically indicated and desired by their patients. And they should refuse to provide inaccurate information about the consequences of abortion, or to follow any other prepared script in counseling their patients, particularly when it involves treating women like children.

Such acts of civil disobedience by individual doctors should be only the starting point.</blockquote>So they should refuse to provide information? That's weird because Dr. Greene himself "chided doctors" at a conference at Boston College for their unwillingness to tell women where they could procure an abortion.

So he's for the government mandating doctors to provide info on where to get an abortion but against government mandating doctors to provide facts that might lead a woman to reconsider an abortion?

There's little logic to their argument unless one sees that the issue tying it all together might just be a fanatical adherence to the abortion-on-demand mantra.

I'm not in the business of doling out strategy tips to pro-aborts but I think in the end this is actually a dangerous strategy for them. If this call for civil disobedience catches on and pro-abortion rights doctors refuse to follow the law, they could have their medical licenses taken from them, leading to a dearth of pro-abortion doctors. Now, that would be a shame, wouldn't it?