Sponsors (10)
Introduced January 22, 2025 by Joni Ernst · Last progress January 22, 2025
The bill improves the completeness and standardization of national abortion data—benefiting public health monitoring and policymaking and preserving some funding—while raising substantial privacy concerns, administrative costs, and funding/penalty risks that could reduce access to services.
Public health officials, researchers, and hospitals will have more complete, standardized national abortion data, improving monitoring, research, and resource allocation for reproductive health.
States that submit required data retain federal Medicaid matching funds for family planning, preserving funding for beneficiaries and programs that serve low-income people.
Policymakers and the public will gain access to annual, publicly available reports and standardized metrics, enabling better-informed policy decisions about maternal and reproductive health.
Patients (especially women in small or rural counties) face increased privacy and confidentiality risks from collecting and publishing detailed demographic abortion data.
States, clinics, and Medicaid agencies will confront increased administrative and compliance costs to collect, certify, and submit detailed abortion data, straining public health resources.
States risk losing federal funding or facing penalties (including loss of Medicaid matching payments) if data are falsified or reporting requirements tied to federal conditions are unmet.
Based on analysis of 4 sections of legislative text.
Requires every State to submit standardized annual aggregate abortion data to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as a condition for receiving federal Medicaid payments for certain family planning services, after a two-year startup delay. Directs HHS/CDC to build and run a national abortion surveillance system, specify mandatory and voluntary worksheet questions (including ten required variables), allow specific cross-tabulations, provide technical assistance to States, and publish annual national reports. States must certify submissions as accurate; knowingly providing false information can trigger a one-year bar on certain Medicaid family-planning payments. The law sets submission timing with a two-year lag for data and a three-year timeline for CDC report publication, and it creates new standardized data elements intended to improve national abortion statistics for public health and policy use.