Ohio Republicans Want an Online Dashboard of Abortion Patient Info

4.11.25

Click to skip ahead: Pushing Personhood has the latest on fetal personhood efforts in Florida and Kansas. Canaries in the Coal Mine looks at legislation attacking Florida teens. Abortion Surveillance flags a move in Ohio to put abortion patients’ information on a publicly available website. In the States, news from Texas and Louisiana. In the Nation, the Trump administration pulled funding for key abortion research, and post-Roe advice for business leaders. Finally, Keep An Eye On looks the rise of ‘Baby Olivia’ bills (again).

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Pushing Personhood

When a young woman in Georgia was arrested for how she disposed of her miscarriage this month, it was the state’s fetal personhood law that allowed prosecutors to charge her with ‘concealing a death’ and ‘abandoning a dead body.’ State Sen. Sally Harrell, who called on her colleagues to reverse the personhood component of Georgia’s abortion ban, called the policy “idiocy.”

“It is the criminalization of women’s bodies,” she said. And that’s exactly right: Since Roe was overturned, fetal personhood policies like the one in Georgia have allowed for hundreds of other pregnancy-related arrests across the country.

But Republicans don’t want voters to know that ‘fetal personhood’ is all about punishment and control—so they’re pushing for it under the auspices of protecting women and families.

In Kansas, for example, Gov. Laura Kelly just vetoed legislation that would mandate child support payments for women begin at the date of conception. Republicans claimed that HB 2062 is just their way of helping pregnant women and holding “deadbeat dads” accountable. From Gov. Kelly:

“At first glance, this bill may appear to be a proposal to support pregnant women and families. However, this bill is yet another attempt by special interest groups and extremist lawmakers to ignore the will of Kansans and insert themselves into the lives of those making private medical decisions.”

Kansas voters rejected an anti-abortion measure in 2022—a message that conservative lawmakers have refused to accept. Republicans say they will override Kelly’s veto.

Florida lawmakers are using a similar approach, rapidly advancing a fetal personhood bill they insist has nothing to do with abortion. HB 1517/SB 1284—which passed the Florida House this week and advanced out of a Senate committee yesterday—would allow people to sue over the “wrongful death” of a fetus.

Bill sponsor Rep. Sam Greco says, “When a terrible tragedy like the loss, the wrongful loss, of an unborn child occurs because of wrongfulness, because of a wrongful act, mothers, parents, should have the ability to seek to be made whole in those circumstances.”

Under the bill, people could sue over mental pain, and be awarded damages based on the salary their fetus would have earned over its lifetime.

Florida Republicans tried to pass a similar bill last year—an effort that failed in large part because of an Alabama Supreme Court decision that said frozen embryos were “extrauterine children.” The national outrage and backlash against that ruling forced Florida Republicans to reconsider their legislation—until now, that is.

Once again, Republicans are loathe to admit what their real goal is. But as Democratic Rep. Ashley Gantt said this week, “This is about establishing that life begins at conception, so let’s clear the air, and let’s just say the thing that’s what it’s about, because if it wasn’t, there wouldn’t have been so much avoiding the questions or the answers to direct questions.”

The consequences of Florida’s legislation goes beyond the potential for criminalization: Experts warn that the law will scare doctors out of treating pregnant women—especially those with high-risk pregnancies. Essentially, the women who need care most would be the least likely to be able to find it.

And Kara Gross, legislative director at the ACLU of Florida, writes at the Florida Phoenix that the bill would result in fewer OBGYNs being willing to practice in the state. There’s already an OBGYN exodus out of anti-abortion states—imagine what that would look like if doctors knew they could be sued in this way.

If you’re reading this newsletter, you’re already well-aware that the push for fetal personhood has nothing to do with protecting women. But it’s vital we keep repeating that anyway—pointing out what the actual, real life consequences of personhood already look like.

Canaries in the Coal Mine

Let’s stick with Florida for a moment, and talk about another troubling bill making its way through the legislature: SB 1288 would require parental consent for birth control and STI treatment—a direct attack on young people’s health and safety.

Right now, Florida doctors can treat minors for STIs or prescribe them contraception without involving their parents if they believe the teen will “suffer probable health hazards if such services are not provided.” This bill would gut that protection. It would also require parental consent for any kind of risk assessment or health survey, effectively ending doctor-patient confidentiality for young people.

As Dr. Amy Weiss, who leads Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine at the University of South Florida, put it: “We're not going to know when they're in dangerous situations, because they're not going to be completely honest with us.”

Naturally, Republicans are calling this a ‘parental rights’ bill—one of their favorite post-Roe talking points. We’ve seen them use it to fight abortion rights ballot measures, arguing that pro-choice amendments would allow children to get abortions or gender-affirming care without their parents’ knowledge. And it was their go-to message when lawmakers in Idaho and Tennessee made it a crime to help a teenager get an abortion.

We knew this would happen. In fact, I warned in my 2025 predictions that Republicans would start slapping ‘parental rights’ on anything and everything.

But what’s happening in Florida isn’t just about conservatives using ‘parental rights’ to strip health access and rights from young people—it’s that they’re using young people as a testing ground for stripping health access and rights from all of us. There’s a reason I have a chapter in my book titled, “Teens are the Canaries in the Coal Mines.” What happens to young people today comes for the rest of us tomorrow.

Let’s be very, very clear: Republicans want to ban contraception, and they don’t need to pass a law to do it. In fact, it’s easier for them if there is no law. No headlines, no voter backlash—just relentless restrictions until birth control is impossible to get.

That’s exactly what they’re doing right now: Chipping away at access bit by bit. Whether it’s targeting teens, like Florida Republicans are doing, or low-income Americans, like Trump did with his cuts to Title X, the end goal is the same: contraception out of reach for anyone who needs it most.

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Need a palate cleanser? Here’s a cute picture of my dog before you move on to the next bit of shitty news.

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Abortion Surveillance

You all know I’ve been tracking “abortion reporting” as a key part of the anti-abortion strategy for years now. Republicans figured out a long time ago that they don’t need facts to pass abortion bans—just data they can twist, weaponize, or flat-out make up.

We’ve seen it in Texas, where lawmakers passed laws allowing conservatives to skew or fabricate abortion “complication” data. We’ve seen it in Indiana, where Republicans have tried to make private abortion reports public records.

And now it’s Ohio’s turn. Republicans there just added a new provision to the state House budget that would massively expand what kind of information is collected about abortion patients—and then make that information publicly available.

Right now, the state health department publishes an annual abortion report that provides pretty basic details: like how many weeks into pregnancy a patient was, what county they lived in, and how old they are.

As WOSU reports, the new reporting mandates would be much broader:

“It would require providers to list each patient’s education level, zip code, number of previous abortions, menstrual history, Rh factor in blood, and the method of contraception used at the time of conception, if any.”

Other information collected includes a patient’s marital status, their education level, race, number of “living children,” and more.

Here’s where it gets extra shitty: The health department would also have to create a publicly available “electronic dashboard” that publishes this abortion data every month.

And while a patient’s name wouldn’t be available, people could reverse engineer someone’s identity using the other information provided. Think about it: the number of children they have, the date of their last birth (aka their kid’s birthday), plus their zip code. In a low-population, rural area? That’s practically a roadmap to someone’s front door.

As Jaime Miracle from Abortion Forward told WOSU, “If you are reporting the number of abortions per county by month, that could be an individual person.”

We’ve seen something similar play out in Indiana, where Attorney General Todd Rokita has been in an all-out war to make individual abortion reports public records in the same way birth and death certificates are. Even the state health department there fought back over how dangerous and invasive that would be.

That invasion of privacy is exactly the point. And as was the case in Indiana, I’m betting the anti-abortion activists in Ohio want this information public for two reasons: First, so they can comb through patient data looking for anything they can frame as “wrongdoing.” And second, to terrify people out of getting care in the first place.

Because who’s going to seek an abortion if they know their personal medical information will be plastered all over a public website?

I’ll keep you posted on what happens next—but it’s worth noting that Ohio voters codified abortion rights in the state constitution a few months ago, protecting access until ‘viability’. As Miracle points out, that includes a ban on discriminating against abortion patients—like, say, forcing them to be the only patients whose medical data gets reported and published for the world to see.

In the States

Okay, let’s talk about Texas—where lawmakers and activists are still in the middle of a fight over the Trojan Horse legislation that Abortion, Every Day exposed last month.

As you might remember, this bipartisan bill (HB 44/SB 31) was introduced with a lot of fanfare, framed as a way to help doctors provide life-saving care without fear of prosecution or civil lawsuits.

The reality? The bills would revive a century-old abortion ban—opening the door to prosecute abortion funds, helpers, and potentially even patients themselves. We even came to find out that the legislation was crafted by Texas Right to Life—an organization that doesn’t believe abortion is ever necessary, even to save a patient’s life.

Over the last few weeks, abortion rights groups, abortion funds, doctors, and pro-choice activists have come out hard against the legislation—warning just how dangerous it really is.

Today, more than a dozen women and families who were denied life- and health-saving abortion care—the plaintiffs in Zurawski v. Texas—sent Texas lawmakers a letter, urging them to oppose the legislation:

“We understand why some lawmakers feel compelled to support these bills and pass them quickly—because the chance to save even one life feels like enough. But we must urge you to take your time and get it right so that these well-intentioned bills don’t have catastrophic unintended consequences.”

And yesterday in The Nation, Dr. Ghazaleh Moayedi—one of the handful of physicians in Texas who applies these laws in real life—wrote that the bill “will not help me save additional lives.”

Dr. Moayedi suggests something that a few of my sources say is a possibility: an amendment stating that the legislation can’t be used to revive the 100-year-old abortion ban.

Still, the best case scenario is that this bill dies. Not just because of the harm it could cause to abortion patients, providers, and funds—but because Texas women deserve better. I think Dr. Moayedi put it best:

“Some will say, ‘we should take what little we can get’ because we are in Texas, which was one of the first states in the country to begin fully banning abortion, in 2021. But I’m an ob-gyn who has dedicated my career to providing abortion care for Texans: I don’t beg for crumbs at the expense of my community.”

In other Texas news, the state House approved a massive $70 million funding boost for anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers—bringing the total funding to over $200 million. These are groups that don’t just lie to women about their pregnancies and the supposed risks of abortion: They also collect clients’ personal private data, telling them that it’s protected by HIPAA. It’s not.

For more on that, read Abortion, Every Day’s investigation into Heartbeat International—the largest network of crisis pregnancy centers in the country:

EXCLUSIVE: Health Data Breach at America’s Largest Crisis Pregnancy Org

Meanwhile, Louisiana Democrats are trying to pass legislation that would allow child rape victims to access abortion care. Right now, Louisiana has one of the strictest abortion bans in the country, with no exceptions for rape or incest. HB 215 would change that—however slightly—adding an exception for rape victims under 17 years old.

Rep. Delisha Boyd made a smart move: She spelled out exactly what crimes would qualify a young victim for care. The list is horrifying: rape, first-degree rape, second-degree rape, third-degree rape, sexual battery, felony carnal knowledge of a juvenile, molestation of a juvenile or a person with a physical or mental disability, crime against nature, aggravated crime against nature.

Why list them all? Because it forces Republicans to confront exactly what they’re voting for. It forces them to admit that it doesn’t matter how brutally a child has been abused—they still don’t care. Let them put that vote on the record.

Quick hits:

• Planned Parenthood of Northern New England (PPNNE) is permanently closing a Vermont clinic;

• More on the lawsuit against a Catholic hospital in California that denied a woman miscarriage treatment;

• And Tanya Atkinson, president of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Wisconsin, says voters “understood the assignment” when they elected Susan Crawford to the state Supreme Court.

In the Nation

Chances are, you’ve heard about the Turnaway Study—one of the most important pieces of abortion research out there. This decade-long study followed people who were either able to get the abortion they wanted or were denied care—and tracked the consequences. (Spoiler: They were devastating. Women denied abortions were more likely to end up in poverty, stay in abusive relationships, and struggle to bond with their children.)

The researcher behind the study, Diana Greene Foster, even won a MacArthur “genius grant” for her work. But apparently that wasn’t good enough for the Trump administration—The 19th reports that they pulled her NIH funding anyway.

I know—we shouldn’t be surprised. But this line from the letter NIH sent Foster gave me an immediate rage migraine:

“Research programs based on gender identity are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment, and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans.”

Fuck. You.

Women are dying. They’re developing sepsis and losing vital reproductive organs. But studying that “does nothing to enhance the health of many Americans”? This isn’t just contempt for science—it’s contempt for our lives.

To learn more about the Turnaway Study, watch Foster’s TED Talk below:

Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, wrote this week about how bans are pushing workers out of anti-abortion states—and what business leaders can do in response. We really do need more pieces like this: clear, actionable advice for employers on how to support their workers. (Which, as a result, will also help their own companies.)

Northup, for example, advises employers to stay up-to-date on changes in reproductive healthcare laws; to ensure they’re covering reproductive healthcare, including travel and paid leave for abortion care; and to consider allowing employees to work remotely.

I get that may seem obvious to those reading this newsletter; but it’s worth remembering that not everyone follows this issue closely, or understands the best way to help. That’s especially true in a country where so many business leaders are men.

Quick hits:

• States Newsroom on how Trump’s anti-DEI initiatives are already impacting maternal healthcare for Black women;

• Mother Jones on Democrats’ efforts to hold anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers to account;

• Ms. magazine on the rise of ‘equal protection’ bills that want to charge abortion patients with murder;

• And did you know there’s a pro-natalist conference called “NatalCon”?? I’m about to go down a rabbit hole that I just know will ruin my weekend.

Keep An Eye On

Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed a ‘Baby Olivia’ bill this week—legislation that would force public schools to show an anti-abortion propaganda video disguised as a fetal development lesson. Republicans promised to override this veto (along with the veto of the fetal personhood bill I mentioned earlier in the newsletter).

The ‘Baby Olivia’ video—produced by the radical anti-abortion group, Live Action—is now mandatory viewing in North Dakota, Tennessee and Idaho schools. Similar bills are being considered in Florida, Kentucky, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and West Virginia. A bill in Arkansas failed to pass committee.

I’ve been keeping a close eye on these bills because they’re part of a broader strategy to indoctrinate young people, build an anti-abortion electorate, and change national educational guidelines around science and fetal development.

Read more about the tactic here and here.