Arizona governor urges the state to stop collecting abortion data, citing patient privacy
Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs is calling on lawmakers to repeal the state law requiring an annual abortion report, saying it infringes on patient privacy, mirroring a push by other Democratic officials to ban such requirements reduce or eliminate.
“The government has no place in monitoring Arizonans’ medical decision-making or tracking their health histories,” Hobbs, a Democrat in a state where Republicans control the Legislature, said in a statement Wednesday as the state released its report on Released 2023. a family is a sensitive and personal experience for a woman and her loved ones; there should be no room for government supervision and publication of that decision.”
Hobbs isn’t the only one concerned about abortion data collection, especially as Donald Trump prepares to take over the presidency again. he could implement hostile policiesor at least less favorable, for the right to abortion.
“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 its own voluntary studies among abortion providers. .
A handful of Democratic-controlled states have lowered reporting requirements in recent years out of privacy concerns and also given the burden it places on providers to collect everything. Republican-led states generally charge 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 just released abortion data for 2023, but won’t collect it at all going forward. Illinois has moved to aggregate reporting instead of requiring providers to send information about each individual abortion. Minnesota has reduced the number of questions required to be answered, eliminating data on marital status, race and ethnicity, among other things.
New York City has also cut back on asking patients demographic questions.
Access to abortion has been shifting across the country since World War II US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 and ended a nationwide right to abortion.
Beginning in the months before the Supreme Court’s decision was announced, the Society of Family Planning, which advocates for abortion rights, launched regularly surveys of abortion providers about their work and has generally announced results quarterly. One of the lead researchers, University of California, San Francisco, public health social scientist Ushma Upadhyay, said the next report won’t be out as quickly as it might otherwise have been.
“We are delaying our next release to give providers time to adjust to the tenor of the new administration,” she said, noting that she hopes providers continue to participate in the survey.
Over the past two years, the report has shown that while abortions have become rare in states where bans exist, the number of abortions overall has increased slightly as people travel for procedures or obtain pills through telemedicine.
Policy changes in Arizona have been more turbulent than most. Providers stopped offering abortions in 2022 due to legal questions about whether an 1864 ban on almost all abortions was valid, then resumed them. Earlier this year the State Supreme Court ruled that the old law could be enforced, but then suspended the start of enforcement. Before it went into effect, the state — aided by some Republican lawmakers who joined Democrats — the old law repealed. And in November, voters added one right to abortion to the state constitution.
The Arizona data made public Wednesday reflects the policy changes, with the state going from just under 14,000 abortions in 2021 to 11,400 in 2022 and to 12,700 last year. The 2024 figures are not in the state report, which is published by the Ministry of Health.
The report began in 1976 with voluntary participation from 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 reports how many previous abortions and live births the patient has had, how far along in the pregnancy she was, and whether the abortion involved a procedure or pills. But the data does not include the patient’s name, address, date of birth or social security number.
For years, four states with generally comprehensive abortion rights laws have skipped participating in the federal government’s collection of state data. California and Maryland do not collect the data. New Hampshire and New Jersey are making it voluntary for hospitals and other providers to provide them.
Rachel Rebouche, dean of Temple University Beasley School of Law and an abortion law scholar, said states do not need to know personal information such as the name and address of people having an abortion. And while it’s helpful to report basic information about abortion, she said, there are risks for abortion rights advocates, especially in reports from states with bans, where the data mainly shows how often abortions are performed through exemptions.
“The tension we are in is patient privacy,” she said, “but also the looming accusation that exceptions are being abused.”