Breaking: Trump is Scrubbing HIPAA Info off HHS Website
The White House is deleting information on reproductive health privacy and discrimination at pharmacies
In yet another purge of vital health data, the Trump administration has scrubbed information about HIPAA protections for reproductive rights from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) website. They’ve also erased guidance on pharmacies’ obligation not to discriminate against patients seeking reproductive health care.1
This comes as the White House continues its deletions and “modifications” of CDC documents related to sexual and reproductive health, intimate partner violence, LGBTQ issues, and more.
And while we knew that HHS was deleting pages containing the word ‘abortion,’ this latest scrub is something more—a worrying road map of policies to come.
The deletions discovered by Abortion, Every Day indicate that it’s likely the White House will roll back privacy protections for reproductive health data, making it easier for law enforcement, prosecutors, and attorneys general to access women’s abortion records. And the removal of guidance on discrimination at pharmacies is a sign that the Trump administration will allow extremist pharmacists to deny women prescriptions to birth control—or anything else they oppose.
Let’s get into the details:
HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, is a federal law protecting private health information. Under Biden, HHS expanded HIPAA protections to bar health care and insurance providers from sharing reproductive health data that could be used in criminal or civil cases against abortion patients or providers.
For example, if a Texas woman traveled to New Mexico for an abortion, the rule prevented her doctors from sharing her identity or health records with law enforcement or bounty-hunting anti-abortion activists.
The Biden rule infuriated Republicans, who were desperate to access women’s private medical records—despite their repeated (and unconvincing) insistence that they don’t want to punish abortion patients.
In 2023, for example, Abortion, Every Day reported that 19 Republican attorneys general were pressuring HHS to allow them access to the records of out-of-state abortion patients. And in September 2024, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the Biden administration over the new HIPAA rule, arguing that it “would unlawfully restrict state law enforcement investigations.”
That’s why these protections matter: They safeguard providers and patients from zealous prosecutions and ensure women seeking abortions don’t have to worry about their private medical records falling into the wrong hands.
Of course, we always expected the Trump administration to revoke these protections—after all, they’re undoing everything Biden put in place on abortion. But they haven’t pulled the trigger yet. And I’d bet Republicans know that headlines about giving prosecutors access to women’s out-of-state abortion records would be a disaster for them. Especially now, when abortion rights are more popular than ever.
It makes me wonder if the deletions are part of a slow rollout of that eventual repeal.
While the rule still stands, the White House is making it as hard as possible for Americans to find out about their repro-related privacy rights. One of the scrubbed pages, for example, laid out how patients and providers can navigate the expanded HIPAA protections. The HHS also deleted information on how patients can protect their reproductive health data while using cell phones and tablets.
Certain pages on reproductive rights privacy remain up at HHS—like the text of the rule itself—but without those purged pages, the information is buried. (Which, I’m sure, is the point.)
Again: This isn’t just a broad erasure of anything related to reproductive rights, but a targeted excising.
Under Biden, for example, the HHS issued guidance banning pharmacists from refusing medication to women based on “pregnancy or related conditions”—something the agency explicitly defined as sex discrimination. But Trump’s HHS wants to let extremist pharmacists refuse women medication for any reason they declare against their ‘conscience.’ In fact, as that guidance was deleted from the HHS site, the agency announced that they’ll “strengthen enforcement” of “conscience” rules.
If a pharmacist believes unmarried women shouldn’t have premarital sex, for example, the White House wants to him to be able to deny that patient birth control. Never mind if the woman lives in a rural area and there’s only one pharmacist in her county. Remember: This was one of the policy directives outlined in Project 2025, and one of the ways that Republicans will chip away at birth control access.
All of which is to say: These documents and websites matter. Abortion, Every Day will continue to collect and publish data and resources that have been removed, but it’s vital that we’re paying attention not just to what has been deleted—but why.
As difficult as it is to watch, at least we’re getting clues about what might come next.
How the HELL is this LEGAL??? Democratic leaders, where the fuck are you????
There appears to be absolutely no power to stop this or any of the other illegal actions by the regime. Judicial if they aren’t bought and paid for- too slow. Congress no power, forget the Supreme Court …. we can March and make calls and vote with our wallet. What else?