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PROFESSIONAL ISSUESDoctors may be liable for patients' fake IDsIn the Courts. By Tanya Albert, AMNews staff. May 10, 2004. Some Texas physicians who provide abortions might be contemplating an in-office display of the "We Card Hard" sign often found in stores that sell alcohol and tobacco. At the very minimum, these doctors are likely to start taking a harder look at the identification cards patients use to prove they are 18, the age at which physicians are no longer required to tell parents their daughter has requested an abortion. In what's believed to be the first lawsuit of its kind, a Texas patient who presented a fake ID and the patient's father were allowed to go forward with a civil lawsuit against a physician who gave the girl an abortion without contacting her parents. Cherise Mosley Hughes first came into the clinic where Houston general practice physician Douglas Karpen, DO, works in the summer of 2000. She didn't have an ID, so the office staff turned her away, court records said. She later returned with an ID that said she was 18. It was not government-issued but did contain a birth date and Social Security number. Dr. Karpen said he didn't contact Mosley Hughes' parents because he had no reason to believe the girl was younger than 18. "It was good-looking ID," Dr. Karpen's lawyer Barbara L. Hachenburg said. "There are a lot of IDs that are not government-issued, for example, work and school IDs." Mosley Hughes received the abortion. In reality, her 18th birthday was still seven weeks away. Now married and a mother of two, Mosley Hughes, along with her father, sued Dr. Karpen and the Aaron Women's Medical Center in Houston. They argued that the ID was obviously fake and that the doctor should have seen through it. [...]Full text of AMNews content is available to AMA members and paid subscribers.
Copyright 2004 American Medical Association. All rights reserved.
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