WISDOM TEETH: The day I moved back to D.C., in August 2001, my wisdom teeth were killing me. I could barely chew. I tried valiantly to eat a Roy Rogers hamburger at a NJ rest stop, because I love them (it tastes like they butter the bun, mmm) and the chain is no longer operating in D.C., but it just hurt sooooo much.

So I went to see the dentist. My dentist recommended that the teeth be removed, which I’d expected. Then he showed me a little cartoon movie.

I still remember this movie vividly. I still remember the little cartoon tooth being dug out from its little cartoon jaw. And I very, very clearly remember the little cartoon nerve being snagged, and damaged, by the tooth on its way out. I vaguely remember the movie’s antiseptic warnings that there was this percentage chance of partial nerve damage and that percentage of total loss of feeling in this, that, or the other sensitive mouth-place. But I do know that the movie was scary. I hadn’t even thought about the possibility that my nerves might be damaged in the course of wisdom-tooth removal.

After seeing this charming movie, I pretty desperately didn’t want to get my wisdom teeth out–but they hurt so much! Fortunately (sort of…), I have a minor blood disorder, which I had to get checked out before I could have the surgery. This process dragged on, due to a few fairly odd bureaucratic mistakes, and probably due to my own unwillingness to get it over with. Eventually, of their own accord, my teeth stopped howling at me, and I could eat solid food once more. I never did get my wisdom teeth out, even though my dentist kept recommending it long after they’d stopped hurting.

I think about this experience when I think about “woman’s right to know” laws that mandate various types of medical counseling about the physical risks of abortion. After Abortion is your best place to go for this stuff, but let me throw in my two cents.

First, it’s just responsible medicine to make sure your patient knows about the physical risks of surgery. Especially elective surgery. That’s true even if you think knowing the risks will make the patient less likely to go through with the procedure. That’s true even if the risks are fairly minor. (I mean, people get their wisdom teeth out all the time, and I’ve never met anyone who got nerve damage from the surgery; yet my dentist, responsibly, thought I should know the risks so I could make an informed decision.)

Second, opponents of “right to know” laws often argue that women already know all that stuff. After all, abortion is a wrenching decision that women don’t make on a whim. Surely they’ve pondered the risks and decided it’s worth it.

But that’s something of a non sequitur. Yes, abortion is a wrenching decision, not made on a whim. But before you can even ponder the risks, you have to know where to look. You have to know what you don’t know. And I’ve found, in my work at the pregnancy center, that a lot of our clients are surprised to hear things that as far as I know (and I’ve read a lot about this stuff) are undisputed medical facts.

For example, we often show clients photos of fetal development. (I’m pretty sure they’re the Lennart Nilssen pictures. If not, they certainly correspond to everything I’ve seen on the Web–these aren’t eight-month fetuses being passed off as zygotes or whatever.) And we get reactions like, “Oh, I never knew!” “Is that really what they look like?” Women are shocked to find out how early the kid begins to look like a baby.

This information sometimes affects their decision to abort or keep the child. Does that mean providing the info is manipulative? To my mind, it’s exactly the opposite–because the information may affect their decision, they need to know it. Information is only relevant if it might affect either your decision as a patient, or how you view that decision. I mean, my dentist didn’t tell me a lot of random facts about how he was going to do the surgery. He showed me the things he thought would be most likely to affect my decision (whether the pain was bad enough that I wanted my teeth out) or my view of the decision (if something went wrong, I’d at least feel like he’d given me fair warning).

Similarly, I do a pretty basic description of abortion procedures. I do not go into graphic detail, I do not make faces, I do not talk about killing the baby. I would say my description of abortion, to clients, is almost as clinical as the wisdom-teeth cartoon. But I know the reality of it–having to assess the up-front and personal description of the uterus, the suction, the curette–makes some women reconsider. Is that a reason to keep them from hearing the descriptions? Absolutely not.

So although I pretty obviously don’t think “right to know” is in any way a sufficient response to abortion (though hey, I don’t think a Human Life Amendment is a sufficient response to abortion either–I’m hard to please that way), I do think it should not be controversial. (I would like these laws not to assume anything about the abortion/breast cancer connection, since they inevitably lack nuance and get stuff wrong–go here for a pretty good round-up from an abortion-rights perspective.) Even if abortion isn’t wrong, it is surgery, and it should be treated as such.