Hey Missouri, Margaret Atwood can’t keep up with you.
In the totalitarian Gilead of her novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the Commanders would appreciate the ingenuity of creating a whole spreadsheet of women’s menstrual cycles. So as to better protect them, of course.
As you’ve probably heard, the Missouri state health director, Dr. Randall Williams, testified this week at a hearing on revoking the license of the state’s last Planned Parenthood clinic that his department kept a spreadsheet on the menstrual periods of women who were patients there. This was to help the health department identify those who’d had complicated abortions. Put another way, it was to help them find something, anything, to justify closing the St. Louis facility.
So in the only state in the country that does not have a statewide opioid prescription database — no way, because that might invade the privacy of patients we’d literally rather allow to die — the health department is tracking who is bleeding again and who is not.
And in a state where the idea of a gun database is such a threat to the privacy of gun owners that it’s on a Hyperloop to nowhere, bureaucrats are rifling through medical records — and really, is there anything more private? — looking for ammunition against Planned Parenthood. Who says government bureaucracy is impersonal?
Read more here:
https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/editorials/article236834368.html#storylink=cpy
