Limerick,
Sorry for the delayed response, you made some good arguments so it took me a bit to put together a defense. Also, I ask that you speak charitably. In other words don’t say “Can you spell …” Instead ask the question in a conversational tone.
Yes I can spell HIPPA, which is a rather intriguing question to ask because I can also spell, HIPAA which is the acronym I think you intended to use. Additionally I can spell, Health Information Privacy Accountability Act of 1996 which is what HIPAA stands for.
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Thanks for the spelling lesson. It wasn’t a typo; I was an imbecile.**
I stated that a woman should be legally obligated to inform the father, unless the father is deemed a danger to the mother or the child. No, the mother should not be able to simply say the father is a danger. If the father is a proven danger then, and only then, should he not be informed of the pregnancy.
**How would this danger be proven, and how long would it take? Long enough so the mother could not pursue having an abortion at all, for instance? **
In order to invoke HIPAA as a protection against this legal compulsion I would have to be advocating that someone other than the mother be tasked with informing the father. HIPAA protects people from having their information disclosed by someone else, it does not protect people from being compelled to reveal their own medical conditions and history. If this were the case, then insurance companies could not have pre-existing conditions clauses.
So here, no doctor, PA, technician, receptionist or any other medical personnel who had a hand in diagnosing the pregnancy could be compelled to reveal the pregnancy to the father. I’m with you …
You want to know something else I can spell, Reasonable Disclosure Clause. This is part of HIPAA, in case you didn’t know. The Reasonable Disclosure Clause of HIPAA states that if a person’s diagnosis or prognosis has the reasonable expectation of a direct effect on another person’s life, health, or well-being than said person is legally compelled to share their diagnosis or prognosis with the person, or people, it has this reasonable expectation in relation to.
This is akin to the familiar “reasonable and customary” phrase one finds throughout a medical insurance policy. When I was pregnant with my live birth, my own insurance company, BC/BS, refused to talk with me on the phone or communicate with me in writing about my wanting to have an amniocentesis done, even though they knew I was bumping up against 16 weeks’ gestation. I told them so by phone and mail. By the time they agreed to allow the procedure the optimal window to have the procedure was long past. I filed a formal complaint with the Insurance Board, who also ignored me. The complaint was forty pages long, with copies of all pertinent phone logs, names of participants, letters that I had sent, etc. Nothing. The gripe was over “reasonable and customary charges”.
For example if you are diagnosed with HIV and then you have sexual intercourse with someone and do not inform them that you are HIV+ you can be charged with attempted murder because this diagnosis had a reasonable expectation of effecting your sexual partner’s life.
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How often has this happened in real life and not on “Law and Order”?**
I think that a woman being pregnant has the reasonable expectation of affecting the father’s life. If you disagree with this please explain how paying child support for 18 years does not affect someone’s life.
HIV is deadly; pregnancy carried to term is not, for purposes of this discussion. I know first-hand how 18 years of child support payments affect someone’s life, from both sides of the fence. My ex-husband was married six times. I was wife #5. He had a child with wife #3; I met this child when she was seven years old. From the time she was seven until the time we were divorced, or from 1980 through 1988, I paid his support for this child because he could not hold a regular job. I was traveling all over the United States, to White Fish, Montana in the dead of winter and Phoenix, Arizona in the absolute heat of summer, making precious little money, and going to the post offices in all these towns for postal money orders to send the the child’s mother. Thousands and thousands. Yes, I know what the impact is. I also experienced receipt of child support from this same man, from 1989 when our divorce became final until our daughter reached the age of majority in 2005. He never showed for the hearing on support, nor did he appear when I took him to court to petition for more money. Pregnancy is not deadly. There is no medical reason for the mother to have to disclose it. In a civilized world people would not entrap other people, but sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t know it until after they have done so.
If this is proven, not merely alleged, and if it is current, not something dredged up from the past, I agree.