Teen sex reporting rule may threaten doctor-patient confidentiality

Organized medicine weighs in with a friend-of-the-court brief. The Kansas case is expected to set precedents.

By Tanya Albert, AMNews staff. Feb. 14, 2005.

Kansas officials want doctors to report any sexual activity by someone younger than 16 as sexual abuse, a requirement that physicians say would harm adolescents instead of helping them.

A federal appeals court is now considering a challenge to a temporary injunction against the attorney general's interpretation of a Kansas state law on which this requirement is based.

Physicians say they fully support protecting children from sexual abuse, but they say mandatory reporting will breach sacred patient-physician confidentiality. And without confidentiality, physicians say adolescents who need to see a doctor will be afraid to seek medical care and won't.

These concerns led Aid for Women, a Kansas City (Kan.)-based practice that provides general care and abortions for women; a number of physicians and other health care professionals to sue the state attorney general in October 2003.

A lower court last year issued a preliminary injunction so that physicians don't have to report every case while the challenge is under way. But the state is appealing the injunction, and it is now up to the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to decide whether Kansas physicians will need to follow this reporting requirement.

The outcome of this case is expected to be precedent-setting. While the courts have ruled extensively on an adult's right to privacy in the doctor's office, case law for adolescents isn't as developed, said Bonnie Scott Jones, a staff attorney for the Center for Reproductive Rights, which is representing the clinic and physicians suing the state.