The Huffington Post reports here that a Satanic religious group is citing Hobby Lobby to claim that the rights to religious freedom of women belonging to the group would be violated by abortion materials required by informed consent laws. Their claim is that the materials include false statements and that their religion calls for making health decisions based on the best scientific understanding of the world. As Marc DeGirolami observes at the Center for Law and Religion (here), however, Hobby Lobby has no application to the informed consent laws of state governments (it only applies to the Federal government) and it is not clear that the mere reception of materials is a serious enough burden on religion to trigger statutory or constitutional religion protections (even assuming the Satanists were to qualify as a religion).
A freedom of religion objection is unsustainable, but a freedom of speech objection is well placed when the government compels doctors to provide false or misleading information to their patients. See Planned Parenthood v. Rounds (adopting the principle, but misapplying it – see discussion by Michael Dorf here). Of course, the government can regulate the practice of medicine, and it would be crazy to say that all regulation of doctor-patient communications require strict scrutiny. But that does not turn those communications into a First Amendment free zone. Borrowing from Dorf, government could not require doctors to inform patients of the value of voting for Democrats to improve their health care before proceeding with a surgical operation. Whatever the standards applied to professional speech, it seems obvious that government has no legitimate interest in compelling doctors to give false information to patients. We need not wait for a Satanist to have an abortion and be provided with false information. To the extent, any of the laws in the 35 states with special informed consent laws for the abortion context require that false or misleading information be provided, rightly understood, the First Amendment stands in the way.
(For an excellent recent discussion of compelled speech of doctors in the abortion context with citations to the cases and relevant literature, see Stewart v. Loomis, 992 F.Supp.2d 585 (M.D. N.C. 2014))
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