Conservatives in Tennessee to Target Doctors Who Perform Abortion for Intimidation, Attack and Murder

Conservatives Give Up the Last Vestige of Conservatism

It is an underlying principle of Conservatism that government should refrain from acting unless there is a clear and specific rationale for acting.  Unless it can be shown that government action is required to provide a solution where no private sector solution is available, government should exercise restraint and refrain from acting.  Actually this is not just a Conservative principle, it is one that the rest of us can adhere to also.

It is also a strict Conservative principle that privacy from government interference in people’s private lives is also required.  For example, one of the most telling arguments against electronic medical records is the privacy issue, the right for an individual’s health records to remain private. 

In Tennessee the Republicans have decided to abandon all pretense of adhering to Conservative philosophy.  They want to publish the intimate details of medical procedures that take place between a physician and a patient.

The Life Defense Act of 2012, which is under consideration in the Tennessee House of Representatives, would direct the state Health Department to post on its website a report on every abortion, to be filled out by the facility where the procedure takes place.

The reports must include the "identification of the physician who performed the abortion and the physician's office, clinic, hospital or other facility where the abortion was performed," according to the official summary of the bill. . . .

Although the bill states that patients will not be identified in the reports, it says the documents must include the woman's county, age, race, marital status, plus her number of prior pregnancies, number of prior abortions, the gestational age of the fetus, and her preexisting medical conditions

This bill serves no public purpose.  It’s only goal is to identify physicians who engage in the legal act of providing abortion services, so that those physicians can be targeted for passive protests and for violent, potentially murderous protests.  If passed, signed into law, and upheld it would literally draw a target on abortion providers and their facilities, enabling those individual who so strongly believe in the sanctity of life that they would kill to identify their targets.

The only value of this proposed legislation is that surely it finalizes, for once and for all, the hollow rhetoric of Conservatives and their belief in limited government and keeping government out of the lives of ordinary citizens.  But then, the rest of us already knew that the Conservative position was largely a tissue of lies.