Arizona’s governor, Katie Hobbs, is calling on legislators to repeal a state law that requires annual abortion reports, saying it violates patients’ privacy, making it difficult to reduce such requirements. Or reflects pressure from other Democratic officials to eliminate.
“The government has no place in making Arizonans’ medical decisions or tracking their health history,” Hobbs, a Democrat from the state where Republicans control the legislature, said in a statement Wednesday. The state released its report covering 2023.
“Starting a family is a sensitive and personal experience for a woman and her loved ones; There should be no room for government monitoring and publication of that decision.
Hobbs is not alone in being concerned about the collection of abortion data, especially as Donald Trump prepares to become president again, when he could enact policies that are hostile to, or at least limited to, abortion rights. Be less favorable.
“It’s really worth thinking carefully about the risks and benefits of collecting data in this new environment,” said Isaac Maddow-Zimet, a researcher at the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights and abortion providers. Conducts its own voluntary survey. ,
The report began in 1976 with voluntary participation of licensed providers and became mandatory in 2010. The state collects detailed information, including whether minors have parental consent, as well as the patient’s age, marital status, and race and ethnicity. It also tells how many previous abortions and live births the patient has had, how far along she was in the pregnancy and whether any procedures or pills were involved in the abortion. But the data does not include patients’ names, addresses, dates of birth or Social Security numbers.
Rachel Rebouche, dean of Temple University Beasley School of Law and an abortion law scholar, said there were risks in reporting for abortion rights advocates, especially in reports from states with restrictions where the data mostly shows how often abortions are provided through exceptions. They went.
“The tension we find ourselves in is around patient confidentiality,” he said, but there are also allegations that the exceptions are being abused.
Some Democratic-controlled states have eased reporting requirements in recent years out of concerns about privacy and the burden on providers to collect it all. Republican-run states generally ask for much more, although many of them have banned abortions at all stages of pregnancy or after about the first six weeks, before many people even know they are pregnant.
Michigan has just released 2023 abortion data but is not collecting it going forward. Illinois has switched to aggregate reporting instead of requiring providers to send information about each individual abortion. Minnesota has reduced the number of questions it requires for matching, eliminating other data including marital status, race and ethnicity. New York City has also reduced asking patients demographic questions.
Abortion access is changing across the country after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 and ended abortion rights nationwide.
Arizona’s policy changes have been more turbulent than most. Providers stopped offering abortions in 2022, then resumed them again amid legal questions about whether the 1864 ban on nearly all abortions was legal. This year, the state Supreme Court ruled that the old law could be enforced, but then blocked the start of enforcement. Before it took effect, the state repealed the old law. And in November, voters added the right to abortion to the state constitution.
Over the years, four states with generally broad abortion rights laws have opted out of participating in the federal government’s roundup of state data. California and Maryland do not collect data. New Hampshire and New Jersey have made its supply voluntary for hospitals and other providers.