States should scale back abortion reporting demands, advocacy group says
[March 12, 2025]
By GEOFF MULVIHILL
States should stop requiring health providers to file reports on every
abortion because the information poses a risk to both them and their
patients in the current political environment, a research group that
advocates for abortion access says.
The Guttmacher Institute says in a new recommendation that the benefit
of mandated and detailed data collection is no longer worth the
downsides: It could reveal personal information, be stigmatizing for
patients and cumbersome for providers — or could be used in
investigations.
“It would be a mistake for anyone to assume now that the information a
state could collect about abortion would not be used to harm people,”
said Kelly Baden, Guttmacher’s vice president for public policy.
Roe v. Wade reversal sparks a battle over reports
When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade nearly three years
ago, it opened the door for states to ban most abortions. It also
ignited policy battles over information collected about ending
pregnancies.
The possibility of reports being used in investigations has increased
with the return of President Donald Trump and anti-abortion officials in
key federal government jobs, Baden said.
Most state health departments require medical providers to report data
about each abortion, though without including patient names.
Massachusetts and Illinois mandate that providers give the state only
aggregated data.
The states that collect the information, in turn, produce reports on
abortion statistics and send their information to the U.S. Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention for a nationwide tally. Together, that
information gives a picture of how often abortion takes place, when in
the pregnancy the abortion occurs and the age of patients.
Those reports provide the fullest government pictures of abortion
nationally, but they come with a lag time of about two years and lack
data from states that don't require the reports: California, the
country's most-populous state, as well as Maryland, Michigan and New
Jersey.
Reports with personal information could hurt patients, data scientist
says
Certain information that some states collect — such as the patient’s
marital status or ZIP code and the reason for the abortion — do not
serve a meaningful research purpose and could stigmatize patients, says
Guttmacher data scientist Isaac Maddow-Zimet. In conjunction with other
data, these details could even be used to identify people who obtain
abortions, he said.
The same level of detail is not required to be reported to the state for
other medical care, Maddow-Zimet added.
“The real concern here is that it fits into a broader pattern of
abortion exceptionalism,” he said.
But Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life, said rolling back
reporting requirements can be detrimental: It could downplay the
frequency of abortion complications, for instance, she said.
Additionally, details such as the reason for the abortion could shape
public policy if it reveals increases in sexual assault, she said.
“The more information we have, the better it is for women,” Tobias said.
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Abortion-rights activists rally outside the Supreme Court,
Wednesday, April 24, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis
Magana, File)
 An Indiana anti-abortion group began
using public records requests to obtain individual abortion reports
from the state in 2022 and report on alleged violations by providers
— including submitting the reports late.
The state Health Department eventually declared that individual
reports are not public records because a ban on most abortions means
so few happen that the reports could be used to reveal who's
obtaining them. Earlier this year, state Attorney General Todd
Rokita settled a lawsuit from the group, Voices for Life, by
mandating that reports — with some personal information redacted —
be available to the public. But the documents are not being provided
as litigation continues.
Melanie Garcia Lyon, the Voices for Life executive director, said in
an email that one doctor had his licensed suspended in part because
of a violation that someone spotted in a terminated pregnancy
report. “Abortion reporting protects women,” she said in an email.
Some states are reducing or eliminating reporting requirements
Michigan has halted required reporting. Minnesota has removed some
required information, such as the marital status, race and ethnicity
of patients.
Arizona's Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat in a state where Republicans
control the legislature, is calling for that state to drop mandated
reporting. A bill that would repeal the requirements hasn't
advanced.
Connie Fei Lu, a medical fellow in complex family planning at the
University of Illinois Chicago, said the 2022 Illinois change to
collect a tally of abortions rather than detail on each one can
protect the privacy of patients, especially those who travel from
other states for abortion.
But she said the data collection policies need to be thoughtful.
“I completely understand the delicate balance in abortion data
collection in an environment where that data can end up in the wrong
hands,” she said. “From a research perspective, from a scientific
perspective, not having this data is not a good thing.”
While Guttmacher wants an end to mandatory abortion reports, it's
not calling for states to get out of the abortion data-collection
business entirely; the group says states could instead use voluntary
approaches to gather information.
Guttmacher and another abortion-rights group, the Society of Family
Planning, have been surveying providers over the past few years. The
groups' analyses rely in part on estimates, but they have been
released much more quickly than government data and have become key
resources for understanding the impact of state bans and
restrictions since Roe was overturned.
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