Editorial: No right to use unconscious patients as learning props
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Going to the hospital involves about as much paperwork as buying a house with a mortgage.
You sign for permission to treat. You check a box to acknowledge federal laws regarding data privacy. Another paper details history. One — or more — will document insurance and financial responsibility. Who is your emergency contact? Would you accept blood transfusions?
For every development, there is a new line to fill in, more initials to scrawl and places to sign to accept a procedure — or to reject it.
And so it is sickening that a new law had to be passed to make it illegal to perform pelvic or rectal exams on unconscious people without consent.
It goes into effect in January in Pennsylvania. When it does, doctors will have to obtain specific verbal and written permission for medical students to perform these internal examinations on patients under anesthesia.
To be clear, it has always been illegal to touch people in an abusive or obscene manner in those most private areas. The point of the law is not about sexual assault. It is about people having a right to agree or disagree with the way their bodies are touched and treated. Yet Pennsylvania joins less than half of American states in requiring consent.
Some critics insist the unconscious patients aren’t just about access but about real bodies not tense with fear. Others object to states putting more demands on providers.
It doesn’t matter what the objections are. The rights of the patient are paramount.
Doctors, medical schools and hospitals still will train the next crop of providers to care for people. They may even do so with more empathy and understanding. The law doesn’t say the exams can’t be done. It just asks for consent.
That’s not a high hurdle to clear. It’s not even unusual. To not ask for consent — and to actively argue against it — makes much less sense.
A medical student has no more right to manually feel an anesthetized woman’s uterus for learning purposes than a hospital does to siphon off a pint of blood while she’s asleep. Just because it would be helpful doesn’t mean it is OK. That’s the argument for concentration camp medical experiments or the Tuskegee syphilis study.
It’s unethical. It’s abhorrent. And come January, it will be illegal in Pennsylvania.