"In Wade, Blackmun ad used the phrase “attending physician” to describe the doctor who would make the abortion decision. This conjures up an earlier time when patients actually had a personal physician who attended them at bedside both at home and in the hospital, but is certainly an inapt phrase for describing doctors who perform abortion procedures in clinics. Typically the pregnant woman is greeter by a nurse, a social worker, or an abortion counselor. The “medical decision” is made with them. She meets the doctor typically only after she is "prepped and in the stirrups." The physician is more appropriately characterized as a technician in an assembly line than an attending physician. There are certainly exceptions to this practice, but the picture I describe will certainly be familiar to the vast majority of the participants in this example of "deliberated medical judgments related to life and health." Doctors, of course, still use the phrase "attending physician" but with a different meaning. As Victor Fuchs has written of contemporary medical practice, my heart can get a doctor, my liver can get a doctor, my head can get a doctor, but I cannot get a doctor.' The nostalgic image of the doctor-patient relationship is important in Bolton because there the Supreme Court had a great deal to say about the importance of the privacy of the doctor-patient relation- ship. The Court made this privacy seem as sacred to law as the privacy of the marriage bed. We shall see how much respect subsequent courts have had for the privacy of the doctor-patient relationship as cases were decided in the name of privacy."
January 1, 1970