Knudsen, other Republican AGs advocate for access to abortion records across state lines
Montana’s attorney general and Republican officials from 18 other states are opposing a federal effort to strengthen medical privacy regulations, arguing that states with abortion bans should be able to obtain reproductive health care records for criminal investigations, including when a patient travels to another state.
Amid the fractured landscape of legal abortion access in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2022, the proposed federal rule change represents the Biden administration’s attempt to boost private health information protections for patients who legally obtain an abortion, including those who travel across state lines. If adopted, health care providers and insurers would be blocked from handing over patient medical records to law enforcement pursuing a “criminal, civil, or administrative investigation” connected to “lawful reproductive health care,” according to the April draft of the proposed rule.
But the cohort of Republican officials argued in a June letter that the Biden administration’s effort to reform HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, would interfere with states’ ability to enforce their own laws.
“Rather than respect the decisions of some States to regulate abortion, the Biden Administration has instead sought to wrest control over abortion back from the people and their elected representatives,” the letter said.
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Roughly 25 million women of reproductive age live in states where abortion is banned, meaning they would have to travel beyond their state of residency to obtain a legal abortion. Abortion providers in Montana have said more patients are traveling to Montana for the service — the Susan Wicklund Fund, an abortion access group, said its financial aid applications from out-of-state patients doubled from 2021 to 2022, increasing to 77 people from 36.
Supporters of the Biden administration’s rule, including abortion rights groups and major medical associations, have endorsed the attempt to prevent patient health records from being used in criminal investigations into lawful health care. The attorneys general of 24 other states, among them Washington, Oregon, California, Colorado and New York, also supported the proposed privacy expansion, citing “a climate of uncertainty and fear in the provision of reproductive health care throughout the country.”