The AMA has filed a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of North Dakota legal provisions forcing physicians to violate the AMA Code of Medical Ethics and act as mouthpieces for politically motivated messages that are misleading and could lead to patient harm.

North Dakota law already requires physicians or members of the doctor’s care team to tell women set to have an abortion that the procedure “will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being.”

Now a provision set to take effect Aug. 1 would force them to also tell women “that it may be possible to reverse the effect of an abortion-inducing drug if she changes her mind, but time if of the essence, and information and assistance with reversing the effects of an abortion-inducing drug are available” in government-printed materials to be given to the patients.

Together, the two provisions “compel physicians and their agents to speak government-mandated messages that entail providing to their patients misleading or even patently false, nonmedical information with which they disagree,” says the complaint filed by the AMA and other plaintiffs.

My latest for the AMA. The whole shebang.