Immediately afterwards, she'd tell them that neither of those statements had any actual basis in medical science. "What I would say was, 'The state requires me to give you this information. We have excellent medical evidence to say that it's actually not true, but I'm required to tell you this,'" she recalls.

When she worked at an abortion clinic in South Dakota, Dr. Diane Horvath-Cosper was legally required to tell prospective patients that there was a chance that abortion would increase their risk of breast cancer and suicide.

Though lawmakers insist that such policies are meant to ensure that women are making informed and safe choices about their own bodies, the informed consent materials are often rife with medically inaccurate and misleading statements. Some states require doctors to mention a specious link between abortion and an increased risk of breast cancer, suicide, or future infertility. Some also contain blatantly ideological language, referring to embryos as "unborn children," insisting that life begins at conception, and saying that abortion at any stage terminates the life of a separate, living being.

Twenty-eight states require abortion clinics to carry written informed consent brochures containing information about alternatives to abortion, the risks associated with abortion, and fetal development stages—all information selected, again, by legislators. In 11 states, the physician is legally obligated to give the brochure to her patients; in 17, she only needs to offer it to them.

Like 37 other states , South Dakota has an abortion-specific informed consent law in place that requires doctors to counsel patients before the procedure, using information chosen by legislators; in 28 states, women must then reflect for a certain amount of time —usually 24 hours, although some states mandate up to three days—before actually getting the abortion procedure. In 14 states, women must physically come to the abortion clinic for both the pre-abortion counseling session and the abortion procedure.

"Typically when you're going for a medical procedure—say you were having heart surgery—your doctor would inform you about the potential risks and benefits of having that surgery," explains Cynthia Daniels, a political science professor at Rutgers who has studied informed consent laws extensively. "But in the case of abortion, of course, there have been a lot of questions about the level of accuracy provided to abortion patients—not just about the procedure, but about information that's not just medical but clearly focused on trying to discourage women from having abortions."

Informed consent is a foundational principle of health care; in the general sense, it's defined as a formal agreement that a medical patient signs in order to give permission for a procedure after being told about the associated risks and benefits. Every state in America currently has a law in place that requires some level of informed consent, and any doctor who fails to obtain it is liable for negligence or battery.

How does a patient trust us if we're giving them false information because we have to?

"I think that certainly the doctor–patient relationship is based on trust—and how does a patient trust us if we're giving them false information because we have to?" she asks.

Critics of abortion-specific informed consent laws accuse politicians of intentionally manipulating the principle of informed consent—which is meant to promote patients' safety and autonomy—in order to carry out their own ideological agendas. "The whole point of informed consent is to provide medically accurate information and then to work with the patient to come up with a treatment plan that's agreeable to them," says Dr. Horvath-Cosper, who now works as a reproductive health advocacy fellow at Physicians for Reproductive Health . "If we're having to give people incorrect information and then saying, 'Well, you know, the state requires me to say this. It's not actually true,' it undermines the patients' confidence in us as providers.

Dr. Horvath-Cosper also worked in a clinic in Minnesota, a state with both an informed consent requirement and a mandatory 24-hour waiting period. "I had to call each patient and read her a script that included all the information that the state wanted us to include about the risks of abortion, about the other options that are available to people," she says. This extra requirement for abortions is superfluous; discussing risks and benefits is standard for all medical procedures.

"Of course we talk about all of these things with the patient, because that's part of medical informed consent!" Dr. Horvath-Cosper says. "We obviously talk about the risks; we obviously talk about the potential benefits."

In a 2012 paper on abortion and informed consent published in the Michigan Journal of Gender and Law, Ian Vandewalker, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, argues that some of the potential abortion risks included in state-mandated informed consent materials are "exaggerated, misleading, or simply false." These exaggerations and inaccurate statements, as he sees it, are intended to "discourage women from choosing to terminate their pregnancies."

Broadly analyzed the written informed consent materials from 26 states. (Of the 28 states with laws requiring written informed consent materials, two have yet to produce them.) According to our findings, 13 states refer to the fetus as an "unborn child." Eight states say that the fetus may be capable of feeling pain at or around 20 weeks. In two states, the informed consent materials say that life starts at conception, and three states say that getting an abortion is tantamount to ending a separate, unique life.

In seven states, the materials imply or reference a link between abortion and breast cancer; three imply a link between abortion and PTSD or "post-abortion" syndrome; four imply a link between abortion and possible infertility. Four mention suicidal thoughts or actions as a possible outcome of abortion.

The National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologist have all disputed the link between abortion and breast cancer. "Post-abortion syndrome" has been debunked; it has also never been recognized by the American Psychological Association (APA) or the American Psychiatric Association. In fact, the APA has found that "there is no credible evidence that a single elective abortion of an unwanted pregnancy in and of itself causes mental health problems for adult women," noting most studies that claim otherwise "suffered from serious methodological problems." The purported link between abortion and infertility has similarly been found baseless. Finally, most scientific literature finds that fetuses aren't capable of feeling pain until at least 24 weeks.

The state should not be in a position where it is mandating what doctors tell their patients.

In addition to the section on the potential risks of abortion, each state's informed consent materials contain a section that includes visual depictions and written descriptions of fetal development, typically broken into two-week intervals. According to a 2013 analysis conducted by a team of four political scientists, who recruited seven specialists in embryological and fetal anatomy to analyze the informed consent materials, about one-third of the statements about fetal development are medically inaccurate—and only 42 percent can be characterized as "completely accurate." In the state with the most inaccuracies, North Carolina, nearly half of the statements about fetal development were medically inaccurate; in the state with the fewest, Alaska, roughly 15 percent were inaccurate.