After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, reproductive rights advocates and legal experts expressed concern that holes in HIPAA could allow law enforcement, or Republican state attorneys general from states with abortion bans, to obtain the medical data of out-of-state abortion patients. In April 2023, President Biden's Health and Human Services Department seemed to heed these concerns, proposing a rule change to bolster abortion patients' (or any patients') privacy rights. A few months later, in June, Congressional Republicans wrote an opposition letter insisting that law enforcement has a right to access abortion patients’ data because, as the letter states, “abortion is not health care.” One of those 30 Congress members is now the Republican vice presidential nominee: Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH). Biden's proposed rule change specifically prohibits health care providers, insurers, and any business governed by HIPAA from giving a patient’s health information to law enforcement. While abortion bans don’t directly threaten abortion patients (only providers) with criminalization, these laws still subject patients to greater criminal suspicion and risk. Just last fall, an Ohio woman was reported to police by a nurse on suspicion of self-managing an abortion, and she faced a felony charge that was ultimately dropped in January. These basic protections for patients were apparently unacceptable to Vance and his co-signatories, who wrote in their letter, “The Proposed Rule unlawfully thwarts the enforcement of compassionate laws protecting unborn children and their mothers, and directs health care providers to defy lawful court orders and search warrants." Disturbingly enough, the "compassionate laws" they're referring to are the very abortion bans that are endangering pregnant people’s lives. Vance and the other signatories further claim the Biden rule change “[limits] cooperation with law enforcement,” “[erases] the humanity of unborn children” AKA fetuses, and “would interfere with valid state laws protecting life.” Essentially, Vance wants states with abortion bans to be able to access pregnant patients' private medical data so they can track (and possibly charge) someone if they leave the state for an abortion. Vance's signature seems in conflict with Donald Trump’s recent, moderate posturing, and specifically, his ostensibly generous claim that he'd leave abortion “up to the states." But Trump also seems perfectly OK with law enforcement accessing patients' private medical data. In May, when asked by a reporter if he’d support states' right to monitor people’s pregnancies to determine if they violated abortion gestation limits, Trump said, “Well, that would be up to the states, they will make a decision as to how they do it.” Before that, in April, when a Time reporter asked Trump if he believed “states should monitor women's pregnancies so they can know if they've gotten an abortion after the ban,” Trump said, “I think they might do that. You'll have to speak to the individual states.” Trump and Vance's shared position on abortion-related surveillance suggests this could be a priority in their administration. Both hold deep connections to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, with Vance literally writing the foreword for a new book by Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and architect of Project 2025. And Trump appointed anti-abortion extremists—many of whom are connected to the Heritage Foundation while some even helped write Project 2025—to the Republican platform committee ahead of the RNC. Project 2025 doesn't just lay out how a second-term President Trump could establish a national abortion ban without Congress—it also describes, in unsparing detail, how to enforce that ban by tracking pregnancies and abortions. And it’s especially chilling that Roger Severino, who served as director of the Trump Health and Human Services Department’s Office of Civil Rights, authored this very chapter of Project 2025. The…
