ms-cellanies reblogged
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.” [...] 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.
[...] 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?
@jessicavalenti writes a solid column in her Abortion, Every Day blog that the GOP's agenda to erode patient privacy of those seeking abortions is a dangerous one.
I can't help but wonder how these misogynistic males would react if the government also kept track of how often men "used their peckers". If it's "good for the goose then it should be good for those horny ganders."
Source: jessica.substack.com
