Maine Bill Would Require Death Certificates for Miscarriages

6.13.25

Click to skip ahead: In Policing Pregnancy, an Illinois police department sent license plate data to Texas cops looking for an abortion patient, and info on a new bill to protect private reproductive health data. In the States, news from Maine, Ohio, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and more. Meet the Creeps introduces you to the Minnesota incel running for Senate. Anti-Abortion Strategy flags a new ‘study’ with a hint at how conservatives may target providers and patients next. Listen Up has a new podcast recommendation. In the Nation, how ‘defunding’ Planned Parenthood is really a backdoor ban on abortion nationwide.

---

Policing Pregnancy

Last month, we found out that Texas cops had tried to find an abortion patient by using data from an automatic license plate reader (ALPR), which gave them access to over 83,000 cameras across the country. (If you missed that story in 404 Media, you should absolutely read it.)

Some of that data apparently came from a suburban Chicago police department—and Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias is not very happy about it. The Associated Press reports that Giannoulias has asked the attorney general to review the matter, and is creating an audit system to ensure cops are following the 2023 law that prevents them from sending license plate data in repro rights cases.

Civil liberties groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have spent years urging pro-choice states to stop sharing ALPR data with law enforcement in anti-abortion states—warning that they could inadvertently aid the investigation of abortion patients and providers. But even when states like Illinois prohibit that kind of data sharing, cops don’t always adhere to the law. (Just ask California.)

“We’re basically just asking cops to pinky-swear that they won’t misuse this data and then act shocked when they do,” Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of STOP (Surveillance Technology Oversight Project), told the AP.

In related news, Democrats in Congress have reintroduced “My Body, My Data Act,” legislation that would protect women’s private reproductive health data. Introduced by Rep. Sara Jacobs, Sen. Mazie Hirono, and Sen. Ron Wyden, the bill would limit the kind of data that companies could collect, use, or disclose—especially those companies that aren’t covered by HIPAA. (Like apps and search engines.)

Here’s what Rep. Jacobs told The Guardian about the legislation:

“Young people live our lives online, right? That includes tracking our periods, but it also includes our phones tracking our location and using Google to think about your medical care or how to obtain an abortion for yourself or a friend, or ordering abortion pills online, or using an Uber to travel to an abortion clinic. All of those things are tracked online, and none of those are protected right now.”

It’s true—and we’ve seen that kind of information used in criminal cases: the Pennsylvania mother and daughter arrested this week had their text messages investigated by cops, and a Nebraska mother and daughter were jailed after police accessed their Facebook messages.

In the States

While we’re talking about criminalization and data, I have to flag some truly batshit legislation out of Maine. LD 975 wouldn’t just have banned abortion across the state—it would have required death certificates for every miscarriage.

Thankfully, the bill was defeated, along with a package of other anti-abortion proposals. But you know how I feel about “dead” bills: this is exactly how we track where conservatives are headed next.

And in this case, the road ahead is bleak.

Maine already requires death certificates for fetal losses over 20 weeks—and mandates that every miscarriage, at any stage, be reported to the state. Health care providers have just ten days after the end of the month to file those reports.

But LD 975 would’ve taken it even further: formalizing that process into a death certificate for every miscarriage, no matter how early.

While the bill is dead, given everything Abortion, Every Day has been tracking—miscarriage arrests, disposal laws, etc—I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw more attempts like this in other states. I’m sure folks will brush them off as too extreme to take seriously—just like they did equal protection bills. And we saw what happened there. (⊙_☉)

One bit of good news: Maine health care providers and advocates are pushing to repeal the state’s broader miscarriage reporting requirement, calling it “an oppressive and invasive level of surveillance over women’s reproductive health.”

Even though Ohio voters codified abortion rights in the state constitution in 2023, it hasn’t stopped Republican lawmakers from trying to restrict access anyway. WOUB reports that Ohio Rep. Josh Williams has introduced a bill to require a 24-hour waiting period before an abortion—even though a law mandating the same is currently being challenged in court.

Wait until you hear the name this guy came up with for the bill: “Share the Health and Empower With Informed Notices Act,” which Rep. Williams has shortened to “SHE WINS.” (Isn’t it SHE WINA?)

The Republican is trying to get around Ohio’s constitutional protections for abortion by framing the law a requirement for “informed consent.” Williams insists, “it piggybacks off what the voters voted for.”

“Doctors should be obtaining informed consent, and you can only obtain informed consent when you actually get the information to the patient and allow them to make that decision on their own with all the medically relevant information.”

I think we can all guess what kind of “medically relevant information” Williams would require doctors to pass along.

While we’re talking about states where conservatives are trying to get around ballot measures, let’s check in on what’s happening in Nebraska. There, anti-abortion activists managed to trick voters into codifying the state’s 12-week ban.

Click here for a refresher, but here’s the short version: Conservatives launched a ballot measure campaign with a name that was nearly identical to an existing pro-choice initiative—one that would have protected abortion rights. To make matters worse, anti-abortion petitioners misled voters, telling them they were signing the pro-choice amendment when they were actually backing the anti-abortion one.

Apparently that wasn’t enough for anti-abortion activists, though—who are now pushing a new ballot measure that would ban abortion entirely. David Zebolsky, co-chair of Choose Life Now, tells the Nebraska Examiner, “We do not consider this a political issue but rather a human rights issue.”

If this campaign sounds familiar, it’s because I flagged them a few weeks ago—specifically because one of their spokespeople blamed abortion for some recent strong storms and drought in the state. Yeah, so at least they’re totally normal.

In more attacks-on-democracy news, let’s turn to Missouri. As you all know by now, Missouri voters enshrined abortion protections until ‘viability’ this past November—but people in the state still can’t get abortions. Not only did the Republican Attorney General get the state Supreme Court to effectively reinstate a total ban, but conservative lawmakers are putting abortion back on the ballot—hoping to codify that restriction.

Over at The Kansas City Star this week, Planned Parenthood Great Plains president Emily Wales says the attack “isn’t a surprise.”

“It’s part of a coordinated effort by politicians to strip Missourians of their rights and deny them care,” she writes.

And in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Mickey Dollens of the Freedom From Religion Foundation says that the “ballot sabotage” sets a dangerous precedent:

“It’s an attack on the fundamental principle that voters can decide their own governance. When politicians can simply ‘send back’ constitutional amendments whenever they disagree, direct democracy becomes meaningless. Missouri voters already settled this question in November. They deserve elected officials who understand that serving constituents means respecting their decisions, not overruling them.”

Finally, a new poll found that 74% of Wisconsin voters don’t want the government involved in abortion. What’s more, 70% support funding health care clinics that provide abortions, and 78% support protecting abortion providers from criminal charges. Those are huge numbers!

The poll comes as we wait for the state Supreme Court to come down with a ruling on abortion rights, and as the Republican party affirmed their support for an 1849 law that they say bans abortion.

Quick hits:

• The Associated Press on the abortion restrictions struck down in Montana;

• More on the Oklahoma bill allowing patients to pick up six months worth of birth control at once;

• And KUT News breaks down what the Texas legislature did on abortion rights.

Meet the Creeps

The next time a woman tells you she’s not qualified to run for office, I want you to show her this guy: Adam Schwarze, a Minnesota Republican running for U.S. Senate, says that women who take birth control are making American society weaker because they’re attracted to “betas.”

While on The Meg Ellefson Show, Schwarze called the number of women on hormonal contraception “concerning,” because “it's changing our culture and values.”

How is that? Well, Schwarze said that “birth control makes [women] attracted to betas,” and as a result, “we are changing our society away from men who are alphas, providers, protectors, doers, builders for these effeminate girlie boys.”

You will never convince me this isn’t just a cope because women don’t want to fuck him. He’s simply too alpha!

Anti-Abortion Strategy

As I wrote earlier this week, I believe we’re on the brink of a major abortion criminalization push. And now a new study from the Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI) may be tipping us off about what the anti-abortion movement is planning to target patients and providers. (It was actually incoming Abortion, Ever Day reporter Kylie Cheung that flagged this for me—so some of this comes from her!)

The Charlotte Lozier Institute is basically the “research” arm of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America—they put out junk science studies almost as often as Elon Musk snorts ketamine. Their latest? A claim that ERs are miscoding abortions as miscarriages at “crisis” levels.

I’ll get into the bad science behind the study next week, but here’s why this one matters: Nine different anti-abortion researchers share a byline on this study—and not just the usual fringe suspects, but their A-list ideologues.

Ingrid Skop is on there, who antis love to trot out in Congress to argue it’s fine for small children to give birth. James Studnicki is there too; he published a paper with Skop that claimed life-saving abortions aren’t necessary. Christina Cirucci and Donna Harrison believe the same. They’re both affiliated with AAPLOG (the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists)—which tells doctors to perform c-sections on women with life-threatening pregnancies instead of abortions.

In short: These extremists don’t show up together by accident. The anti-abortion Avengers are plotting something.

What are they getting at? Well, they say their findings about miscoding are “especially troubling considering pro-abortion advocacy groups actively encourage women to withhold their abortion history in emergency room settings.”

Translation: They’re mad that abortion rights groups tell patients it’s okay not to disclose a self-managed medication abortion when they go to the ER. It’s indistinguishable from a miscarriage, and if the patient lives in a state where abortion is criminalized—it’s understandable to want to keep that private!

In fact, even the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) says there’s no reason for providers to ask about or document abortion pill use. And as Dr. Daniel Grossman, director of Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) told me: When someone comes in with a complication like bleeding or retained tissue, “it doesn’t matter if they had a spontaneous miscarriage or took medications—the treatment is the same.”

But anti-abortion groups don’t like that one bit, claiming it’s “unethical and dangerous” for doctors not to know if a patient has taken the pills. The truth? They want to be able to track who is having abortions despite state bans.

And here’s my big worry: When anti-abortion groups roll out “research” like this, it’s often a preview of what’s to come—new messaging, new legislation, a new campaign. My guess is that they plan to push for hospital policies and state laws requiring doctors to ask patients whether they’ve taken abortion pills—possibly even punishing providers who don’t. Remember how Texas doctors have to report fake abortion ‘complications’ or risk their license? Like that.

They’ll claim that it’s medically necessary to know whether someone took abortion pills (it’s not), or that they need to track cases where pills were slipped to patients unknowingly. But the goal is the same as it’s always been: criminalization.

The worst case scenario is that they make moves to do what some cops in Poland and the UK have done: test patients for the presence of abortion pills. To be clear: that is a long way off—no such test exists in the U.S. right now. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s something the anti-abortion movement is considering long-term.

After all, Republicans are hell-bent on stopping abortion pills: they know that over 60% of abortions in the U.S. are medication abortions, that one in five are prescribed via telehealth, and that both have allowed women to sidestep state bans.

That’s why they’re throwing everything they can at the wall: claiming the pills poison groundwater, that the medication enables abusers, and—most recently—pushing a widely-panned study claiming abortion pills are dangerous.

Listen Up

If you’re looking for a great new series to listen to, I just started “The Network” from NPR and Futuro Media. It kicks off in the mid-1980s, when a Brazilian OB-GYN noticed that fewer women were dying from abortion complications. Hosts Victoria Estrada and Marta Martinez trace the decades-long story of how activists discovered a method for self-managed abortion—and how they spread that knowledge around the world.

Listen to the first episode below:

In the Nation

States Newsroom has an important piece on what “defunding” Planned Parenthood really means: “a backdoor nationwide abortion ban, eliminating access to 1 in 4 abortion providers.”

That’s right, Trump’s “big beautiful bill” could potentially kill access to a quarter of the country’s abortion providers—even in pro-choice states. In fact, the bill could shutter half of the Planned Parenthood clinics that provide abortions. More than 90% of those closures would happen in states where abortion is legal.

In other words, Republicans and the anti-abortion movement are using this bill to informally ban abortion across the country, no matter where you live or what voters want.

Planned Parenthood president Alexis McGill Johnson told States Newsroom that they’ve been meeting with senators to make clear just how dire this would be:

“We are encouraging everyone to reach out to their representatives about this. They know that they’re doing this under a watchful eye, and we want to make sure their constituents know about it.”

Just a nightmare.

While we’re talking about Planned Parenthood, let’s get this sentence out of the way—because I hate every word and name in it: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, chair of the subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE), has notified Planned Parenthood that they will be “investigating” the organization’s supposed “misuse” of federal funds. The letter is just about as noxious as you would expect.

I really liked this column at Slate from Mary Ziegler, author of Personhood: The New Civil War over Reproduction. The law professor lays out how Donald Trump is trying to have it both ways on abortion—tossing scraps to the anti-abortion movement without actually giving them what they want. (Like the Comstock Act, for example.)

Take the White House’s recent announcement on EMTALA and emergency abortions. I flagged that in the administration’s announcement, they nodded at fetal personhood by suggesting that doctors have a responsibility to treat “a pregnant woman [and] her unborn child.”

Ziegler writes that this language could be a way to make anti-abortion conservatives feel better about the fact that Trump hasn’t enforced Comstock or restricted mifepristone yet:

“Trump has used this technique before: winking at the idea that constitutional rights begin at fertilization, without spelling out any concrete plans to advance the idea of fetal personhood. The 2024 GOP platform deployed this strategy. So did a January 2025 executive order on gender ideology, which described sex in terms of a person’s identity ‘at conception.’ This kind of talking point convinces abortion opponents that Trump will eventually do something major to advance their interests without committing the president to anything.”

Obviously, that doesn’t mean that the only damage being done is rhetorical. Ziegler points out that the chilling effect and fear that follows after announcements like the one about EMTALA could be enough to seriously impact care.

For more on what’s happening with EMTALA, US News has a Q&A with Sara Rosenbaum, professor emerita of health law and policy at George Washington University who worked on the original legislation. She calls the Trump administration’s rescinding of the federal guidance on emergency abortions a “very dangerous development.”

“And what this is saying is that if there is one of these situations like what gave rise to Idaho, where a state threatens to prosecute a hospital for following EMTALA, not only will CMS [Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services] probably not defend the hospital, but CMS could even issue a ruling to the state saying, ‘You are correct, EMTALA does not trump your state law, so we are not interfering with your prosecution.’”

Quick hits:

• HuffPost on Republicans’ moves to repeal the FACE Act, federal protections for abortion clinics;

• The Associated Press looks at the shield state providers who are ensuring abortion patients can get care no matter where they live;

• And Jennifer Weiss-Wolf writes in Ms. that three years after the end of Roe, “the stakes for women just keep rising.”