Abortion opponents are sifting through public records — including 911 calls, autopsy reports, and state health department documents — in order to glean medical information about women who have had abortions, according to a report from the Washington Post and ProPublica.
The report also states that some activists dig through the trash at abortion clinics to look for patient records in dumpsters. If they find these documents, they use them to file complaints that providers are violating privacy laws by making their patients’ information too easily accessible.
The anti-abortion activists who seek this type of medical information — many of whom publish their findings online — say they’re not trying to identify patients’ identities or breach women’s privacy. Instead, they want to make sure that abortion doctors aren’t breaking the law.
Abortion opponents typically invoke Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia-area doctor currently serving prison time for performing illegal abortion procedures in his unsanitary clinic, as proof that there needs to be more oversight in this area.
“This is about saving the lives of women,” Cheryl Sullenger, the senior policy adviser for the right-wing group Operation Rescue, told the ProPublica reporter. “A lot of people don’t understand that. It’s a systemic problem within the abortion industry today for abortion providers to cut corners on patient care.”
Sullenger’s group is notorious for its extreme tactics in the crusade against legal abortion. Sullenger herself was once sentenced to prison for attempting to bomb an abortion clinic. Some scholars characterize the group as a potential domestic terrorist organization.
Reproductive rights groups say this type of mining through public records, and pushing the bounds of medical privacy laws, is yet another concerning strategy from the activists who will stop at nothing to undermine women’s ability to terminate a pregnancy.
State and federal officials have been collecting public health data related to abortion for decades. Each year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention requests information from state health agencies about abortion patients’ basic demographic information, the locations where abortions are performed, and the types of abortion procedures employed. Then, the CDC aggregates states’ individual-level data to publish reports on the raw numbers, so it’s not possible to identify who the patients are.
Groups like Operation Rescue have been pushing for more of this information to be made public, and have filed lawsuits against specific states to obtain 911 calls made from clinics and data on minors who have had abortions. Courts have largely declined, ruling that more specific information about who is choosing to end a pregnancy is not in the public interest.
Nonetheless, in the course of litigation, some additional information about individual patients may come to light against their will. One patient, Alicia, told ProPublica that the records for her own abortion procedure were subpoenaed — initially without her knowledge — after she was transported from a clinic to a hospital because of a tear in her uterus. Operation Rescue posted photos of the ambulance on its website and someone tipped off the Nebraska health department.
Though Alicia says she doesn’t blame her doctor for the tear, which was a potential complication that was explained to her before the procedure, she was drawn into the fight and felt her privacy had been violated. “All this happened because I was in the clinic having a legal abortion,” she said. “All they cared about was judging me… and building evidence for their case.”
Right-wing activists have a history of attempting to carefully track doctors and patients in a way that makes abortion rights proponents uncomfortable. For instance, abortion opponents often leap into action when a 911 call is made from a women’s health clinic, and have even published photos of patients in stretchers. Some protesters outside of clinics have also devised spreadsheets to log the license plates of people coming and going from the parking lot. And once activists learn details about abortion doctors’ private residences, they publish their photos and addresses online.
Sometimes, potential privacy breaches are written into state laws themselves. North Carolina lawmakers made headlines earlier this year for proposing new legislation that would require abortion doctors to submit detailed information about patients’ procedures to the state, including images of their ultrasounds. Other states have changed their abortion surveillance practices to require doctors to ask women why they are choosing to end their pregnancies, which is information that reproductive rights groups like the Guttmacher Institute says is too “intrusive” from a public health perspective.
Sullenger says that, in “most cases,” her group refrains from publishing patients’ names and photographs. But she believes it’s important to track instances of complications stemming from abortion, and to lodge formal complaints that could end up disclosing private information, as a method of exposing the doctors who aren’t doing their jobs well.
There isn’t much evidence that abortion providers are falling down in this area, though. Researchers have found that the rate of serious complications from first-trimester abortions — in other words, the issues that may land a patient in the hospital — is less than 0.05 percent. Immediately after the Kermit Gosnell story broke, when Republican members of Congress pushed for a national review of legal abortion clinics to search for similar violations of the law, that GOP-led investigation turned up evidence only that clinics are already very safe and highly regulated.