Killing Confidentiality

The GOP wants women's abortions to be public record

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita says that abortion reports aren’t medical records, and that they should be available to the public in the same way that death certificates are. While Rokita pushes for public reports, New Hampshire lawmakers are fighting over a Republican bill to collect and publish abortion data, and U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville has introduced a bill that would require the Department of Veterans Affairs to collect and provide data on the abortions performed at its facilities.

Just last week, Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed legislation that would have required abortion providers to ask patients invasive and detailed questions about why they were getting abortions, and provide those answers in a report to the state.  

All of these moves are part of a broader strategy that weaponizes abortion data to stigmatize patients and to prosecute providers. And while most states have some kind of abortion reporting law, legislators are increasingly trying to expand the scope of the data, and use it to dismantle women’s privacy.

Rokita’s ‘advisory opinion’, for example, argues that abortion data collected by the state isn’t private medical information and that in order to prosecute abortion providers, he needs detailed reports to be public.

In the past, the state has issued reports on each individual abortion. But as a result of Indiana’s ban, there are only a handful of abortions being performed in the state. As such, the Department of Health decided to release aggregate reports to protect patient confidentiality, noting that individual reports could be “reverse engineered to identify patients—especially in smaller communities.”

Rokita—best known for his harassment campaign against Dr. Caitlin Bernard, the abortion provider who treated a 10-year-old rape victim—is furious over the change. He says the only way he can arrest and prosecute people is if he gets tips from third parties, presumably anti-abortion groups that scour the abortion reports for alleged wrongdoing. He wants the state to either restore public individual reports, or to allow his office to go after abortion providers without a complaint by a third party. (Meaning, he could pursue investigations against doctors and hospitals without cause.)

Most troubling, though, is his insistence that women’s private abortion information isn’t private at all. Even though individual reports could be used to identify patients, Rokita claims that the terminated pregnancy reports [TPRs] aren’t medical records, and that they “do not belong to the patient.”

“Like death certificates, TPRs are public records open to public inspection for the purposes of government transparency,” he writes.

Destiny Wells, the Democratic candidate for Attorney General, said in a statement that she was “outraged” by Rokita’s actions. “There is no excuse for subjecting Hoosiers to Todd Rokita’s state sanctioned breach of patient confidentiality.”

As I flagged last month, abortion reporting is becoming more and more important to anti-choice lawmakers and groups. Project 2025 includes an entire section on abortion reporting, for example, and major anti-abortion organizations like the Charlotte Lozier Institute and Americans United for Life want to mandate more detailed reports.

The goal, of course, isn’t to actually obtain information about abortion for the good of women. The point is to interfere in the doctor-patient relationship, make it more difficult for providers to do their jobs, and to shame women out of getting care.

If patients know that detailed information about their health and life will be reported to the state, they’ll be much less likely to seek abortions—especially if that data will be publicly available. Women in rural communities, in particular, might have to balance getting the care they need against the risk of being identified.

The shame and fear doesn’t end there: Mandating that doctors ask women why they’re getting care implies they need a reason to begin with. And as New Hampshire Sen. Becky Whitley warned in a floor debate last week, reporting mandates could also force doctors to perform unnecessary and invasive trans-vaginal ultrasounds in order to be able to report the correct gestational age of a fetus. “That should send chills down the spine of every woman in the state,” she said.

Democratic responses like this are smart and necessary; voters need to know that abortion reporting laws will directly impact patients. As is the case with funding for crisis pregnancy centers and legislation about ‘prenatal counseling’ or ‘perinatal hospice care’, Republicans are advancing abortion reporting mandates under the guise of protecting women. And in a moment when voters are furious over abortion bans, anti-choice lawmakers and organizations very much need Americans to believe that lie.

We have to make clear that state GOPs aren’t just banning abortion, but enacting any and every punitive policy that they can—especially those that strip us of our medical privacy. After all, it was less than a year ago that 19 Republican Attorneys General wanted the ability to investigate the out-of-state medical records of abortion patients.

Did we really think they were going to stop there?

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For more on anti-abortion strategy and data, read my 2023 investigation into Texas’ abortion ‘complication’ reporting law:

Texas is Fabricating Abortion Data

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