By CURT ANDERSON
WASHINGTON (AP) - Doctors should be prohibited from testifying for their lawsuit challenging the Partial-Birth Abortion Act unless the government has access to patient medical records, the Justice Department told a federal judge Monday.
The Justice Department motion filed in U.S. District Court in New York also points out that the National Abortion Federation, a professional association of abortion providers, has previously argued that patient records are essential to determine a procedure's medical necessity.
"The government's efforts to obtain the medical records that relate to plaintiffs' performance of late-term abortions ... in this case have been completely thwarted, notwithstanding that plaintiffs admit that such discovery is entirely appropriate," says the Justice Department court filing.
Without the records, the government adds, the judge should prevent the doctors challenging the law "from offering any testimony about the purported medical necessity for partial-birth abortion."
Lawsuits brought in New York and elsewhere challenge a new law barring a procedure referred to by critics as partial-birth abortion and by medical organizations as "intact dilation and extraction." During the procedure, a fetus's legs and torso are pulled from the uterus and its skull is punctured.
Privacy and civil liberties groups have roundly criticized the Justice Department's attempts to gain access to the records as an invasion of medical privacy. Attorney General John Ashcroft insists that names and other identifying information would be edited out to protect the patients.
In Monday's motion, Justice Department lawyers write that the National Abortion Federation, in a recent "resource guide" describing efforts in Congress to pass the law, asserted that critics were not competent to judge the procedure's necessity because they hadn't reviewed the records.
The document seeks specifically to rebut a group formed by former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop called Physicians Ad Hoc Coalition for Truth, or PHACT, that opposed the procedure. Because Koop's organization had seen none of the patient records, the abortion federation document says, "These doctors cannot determine what medical options were most appropriate."
A spokeswoman for the National Abortion Federation did not have an immediate response.
The Justice Department is attempting to persuade federal judges to order at least six hospitals and six Planned Parenthood affiliates to provide the abortion patient records so the government can defend the law.