Abortion and Privacy in South Carolina

If you were to have an abortion, how would you feel if the government had a legal right to obtain your name and records, but no legal requirements to keep that information private? Many people would be bothered by that - and if you count yourself as a part of that group, then don't get an abortion in South Carolina. Then again, maybe that's the point of the law?

Low Country Now reports:

"There's absolutely no confidentiality protection at all in the law," said Bonnie Scott Jones, a lawyer for the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights. "This is an abortion-only exclusion from the protections of informational privacy." ... Under South Carolina's legal code, the state is allowed to disclose publicly information obtained during an investigation of a state-licensed facility or employee. Since the 1995 law doesn't require the state to keep confidential the names found in an abortion clinic's files, Jones argues that a licensing hearing could result in the public's access to the names and addresses of every woman who visited a particular clinic or doctor.

There exists an internal policy against the release of names, but departmental policies are much weaker than laws. To be quite blunt, this looks like it was designed to give the government leverage over women who might consider exercising their right to obtain an abortion - if they do it, their names and addresses could be released to the general public. Who wants that? Only the people who oppose abortion, as near as I can figure.

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