Part 1 of this story, which explores Baton Rouge’s pregnancy help centers, is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLtknx3gr9s
One of Louisiana’s most important abortion laws was passed with a big push from Louisiana Right to Life, an anti-abortion organization.

The 2011 Women’s Right to Know bill requires any woman seeking an abortion to be provided with a state-drafted booklet, which contains information about fetal development, risks associated with the procedure, and abortion alternatives. Health care providers offering abortions must also post signs that direct patients to this information at several points in the facility.

The full text of the Women’s Right to Know booklet is available on the website of the Louisiana Department of Health.

Louisiana Right to Life’s executive director Ben Clapper, who held this position at the time of the passage of this bill, says that the information given is “an informed consent type of thing” and that its purpose is “empowering women with more information about their pregnancy… so they can make a more informed decision.”

Clapper believes that prior to the Right to Know bill, women were not being provided with enough information, and that testimonies from women who had an abortion then regretted it were crucial to the passage of the law.

But while the bill saw little pushback from Louisiana’s overwhelmingly pro-life legislature, several abortion providers testified against it. I spoke to a doctor at the Delta Clinic in Baton Rouge, one of three total abortion facilities in the state, to find out why this may have been. Due to the sensitive nature of the topic, they wished to be interviewed anonymously.

The doctor told me that while some of the information in the booklet is accurate, like the stages of fetal development, much of the content and language “really contradicts and conflicts with [their] medical training.”

For example, the booklet freely uses the term “unborn child” when referring to a pregnancy, even defining abortion as a procedure that “will, with reasonable likelihood, cause the death of the unborn child.” (http://ldh.la.gov/index.cfm/page/914)

The doctor claims that this definition is inaccurate, and that in medical literature, even the term “fetus” is not used. According to their training, the correct phrasing would be either “termination of a pregnancy”, or “interrupting the continuation of an unwanted pregnancy.”

Overall, their belief is that the booklet conflicts with the approach to women’s care advocated by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), which is “to present information in an unbiased, accurate, and the most informed and efficient way possible.”

But the Women’s Right to Know bill has not seen the controversy in Louisiana that similar laws have in other states. It might simply be that most people don’t know about it, so as awareness increases, the debate surrounding the law may as well.