Being Admitted to the Hospital or Signing Consent Forms is NOT “Implied Consent”

by Cristen Pascucci Sep 18, 2017
Even in 2017, women’s consent rights in childbirth are disturbingly unclear to the professionals and institutions delivering their medical care.  One aspect is the idea of “implied consent”–a concept mischaracterized by hospitals to a number of women who have contacted me, and sometimes used to justify violations of their dignity and rights.
Specifically, when these women have complained to their hospitals about receiving one or more non-consented or forced procedures in birth, they were told that their explicit consent was not necessary because they had a) agreed to be admitted to the hospital or b) signed blanket consent forms giving the medical staff permission to treat them.  Sometimes these hospitals refer to this, erroneously, as “implied consent.”  The idea is that once the women were admitted or signed those forms, they should no longer have had the expectation that the care team must obtain consent for each procedure during treatment–including medication, surgical cuts, and procedures performed on and through the vagina–but, rather, expect that the care team had the authority to administer whatever treatment they chose for the duration of that patient’s labor or hospital stay.  Put another way, from the perspective of the hospital, these women had forfeited their rights to informed consent and refusal in order to give birth in their facilities.

See more:
birthmonopoly.com/impliedconsent/