Wesley Hogan: What are the things that keep you up this week?
Dr. Caitlin Bernard: I think it’s similar. So now we have these exceptions. So I have to figure out, for every single patient, if their health condition rises to the level of the way that the law is written, which is “risk of permanent impairment of a major bodily function.” And sometimes it’s very clear, but I learned very quickly, as soon as our ban went into effect, that actually most of them are very not clear. And the implications of that– both if I say, “Yes, I do think,” the way it goes down is essentially, “Yes, I think that it meets the criteria,” usually I have another person certify that as well to back me up, I do their abortion, then I have to send a report about that abortion to the health department. In that report, it includes the reason for the abortion as well as lots of information, personal health information, about that person. And the procedure. And then, every two weeks, the health department sends that to [an outside anti-abortion organization] Indiana Right to Life. Because they have a standing Freedom of Information request for all terminated pregnancy reports. And so then, somebody who is–
HOGAN: It’s deidentified information?
BERNARD: It depends what you mean by deidentified. Does it include HIPAA identifiers? Yes. Yes, it does. So then Indiana Right to Life can decide, “I don’t think that reason is good enough, I’m going to send a complaint to the [state] Attorney General’s office.” And then they can start an investigation into me, and that procedure.
HOGAN: And has that been done already?
BERNARD: Yes.
HOGAN: When that procedure unfolds, what kind of layers does that add to your workflow?
BERNARD: It is mostly on the lawyers.
HOGAN: For the health system?
BERNARD: Yeah. Because then they start the process to essentially try to resolve that complaint. But at any time, if they’re unable to resolve it, or if the [Indiana state] Attorney General [Todd Rokita] so chooses, he can send that to the [state] medical licensing board, and then it starts the medical licensing board process, like what happened to me last time [in 2022]. For example, the way that that medical licensing board process started last time for me, was that people from out of state, not Indiana, sent those letters of complaint to the Attorney General’s office, and they said all kinds of bizarre, nonsensical things. But it essentially allows him to politically persecute us. So at the current moment, we have lots of those complaints working their way through the legal system, for all kinds of different– a box wasn’t checked that should have been checked, or a box was checked that shouldn’t have been checked. Or somebody at Indiana Right to Life decided that this abortion wasn’t legal. That’s what keeps me up at night, is that process. That if I say, “Yes, you deserve to have an abortion,” I could end up in another medical licensing hearing. And if they decide that it was an illegal, unlawful abortion, I could go to jail and lose my license. If I say, “No, we can’t do your procedure,” then they don’t get a procedure. We can do everything that we can to get them out of state, but in the end, that may or may not happen. And so any complications, and trauma, and lifetimes lasting because they didn’t get the abortion that they needed, I feel like on me. And so it’s a Catch-22.
