Arizona governor Katie Hobbs is calling on lawmakers to repeal a state law that requires annual reporting of abortions, saying it intrudes on patients’ privacy, echoing other Democratic officials’ push to reduce or eliminate such requirements.
“The government has no place in scrutinizing Arizonans’ medical decisions or researching their health history,” Hobbs, a Democrat in the state’s Republican-leaning legislature, said in a statement released Wednesday to cover his state’s 2023 resignation.
“Starting a family is a sensitive and personal experience towards a woman and her loved ones; there would be no place for the government to keep and publish that decision.
Hobbs isn’t the only one concerned about the collection of abortion data, especially as Donald Trump prepares to take office again, when he could bring policies hostile or at least less successful to abortion rights.
“It’s really important to think 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 does its own abortion research. .
A report on voluntary participation by licensed providers was created in 1976 and became available in 2010. The state collects detailed information, including whether the minors have parental consent, as well as the age, marital status, gender and ethnicity of the patient. It also matters how many miscarriages and live births she has had in the past, how far she has been in pregnancy, and whether she has had an abortion or is on the pill. However, the data does not include name, address, date of birth or social security number.
Rachel Rebouche, dean of Temple University’s Beatrice School of Law and a scholar of abortion law, said there is a danger in reporting on abortion rights advocates, especially in reports from states with bans where data generally shows how often abortions are provided through exceptions.
“We found a contention in patient confidentiality,” he said, “but there is also an allegation of abuse of exceptions.”
Democratic states have introduced some reporting requirements in recent years regarding privacy concerns and also the burden placed on providers to collect them all. Politically-run states generally ask for a lot, although many of them have banned abortion at all stages of pregnancy or after about the first six weeks, before many people know they are pregnant.
Michigan has just released abortion data for 2023 but is not collecting progress at all. Illinois switched to reporting to the university instead of requiring providers to send information about each abortion. Minnesota reduced the number of questions it required to match, eliminating information on marital status, race and ethnicity, among other things. New York also cut back on the demographic questions asked by patients.
Abortion access has been fluctuating around the country since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022 and ended the right to abortion nationwide.
Arizona’s policy changes have been more disruptive than most. Abortion providers stopped offering them in 2022 amid legal questions about whether the 1864 ban on nearly all abortions was passed, then resumed them. This year, the state Supreme Court ruled that the old law could be enforced, but put the start of enforcement on hold. Before he could do that, the state repealed the old law. And in November, voters added the right to abortion to the state constitution.
For years, the four states with the most expansive abortion rights laws, participation in public information to the federal government. California and Maryland do not collect data. New Hampshire and New Jersey make it voluntary for hospitals and other providers.