Project 2025 Agenda Would Monitor Women’s Pregnancies and Roll Back the Same HHS Privacy Protections that JD Vance Advocated Against in the Senate

In response to JD Vance’s lies about the Trump-Vance ticket’s dangerous anti-choice Project 2025 agenda at last night’s debate, DNC National Press Secretary Emilia Rowland released the following statement: 

“JD Vance tried to gaslight the entire country last night because he knows that most Americans would be horrified by his and Trump’s Project 2025 plans to ban abortion nationwide, threaten doctors with jail time, threaten access to IVF and contraception, and surveil women’s pregnancies. But if you Google Project 2025 and turn to page 455, you’ll see that Project 2025’s Orwellian plans for pregnancy monitoring call for every abortion, miscarriage, stillbirth, and incidental pregnancy loss from medical treatments like chemo to be reported to the federal government – including in states that currently protect reproductive rights– and rolling back the same reproductive privacy protections under HIPAA that Vance also advocated against in the Senate. This November, voters will remind Trump and Vance that politicians have no place in our doctor’s offices.”

Read it for yourself: Project 2025 calls for every abortion, miscarriage, stillbirth, and incidental pregnancy loss from medical treatments like chemo to be reported to the federal government. The plan even calls for increasing surveillance for women by rolling back privacy protections:

HuffPost: “How A Trump-Vance Presidency Might Allow The Government To Monitor Pregnancies”

“There is evidence that, if elected, Trump and his vice presidential pick, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), would permit or even encourage the type of Orwellian surveillance described in Project 2025.”

Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership, p. 455: “CDC should require monitoring and reporting for complications due to abortion and every instance of children being born alive after an abortion.” 

Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership, p. 455: “Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method. It should also ensure that statistics are separated by category: spontaneous miscarriage; treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy); stillbirths; and induced abortion.” 

Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership, p. 497: “OCR should withdraw its Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) guidance on abortion. OCR should withdraw its June 2022 guidance that purports to address patient privacy concerns following the Dobbs decision but is actually a politicized statement in favor of abortion and against Dobbs.” 

Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership, p. 455 Data Collection: “The CDC’s abortion surveillance and maternal mortality reporting systems are woefully inadequate. CDC abortion data are reported by states on a voluntary basis, and California, Maryland, and New Hampshire do not submit abortion data at all.”

Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership, p. 455, 456: “Comparisons between live births and abortion should be tracked across various demographic indicators to assess whether certain populations are targeted by abortion providers […] The Ensuring Accurate and Complete Abortion Data Reporting Act of 20239 would amend title XIX of the Social Security Act and Public Health Service Act to improve the CDC’s abortion reporting mechanisms by requiring states, as a condition of federal Medicaid payments for family planning services, to report streamlined variables in a timely manner.”

Both JD Vance and Project 2025 have called on HHS to roll back protections that limit law enforcement access to medical records of people seeking reproductive services. In the Senate, Vance even signed onto a letter opposing an HHS rule to protect reproductive health care privacy. 

Mother Jones: “Add to that [Vance’s] recent support for the use of patients’ medical records by the police to investigate people who travel out of state for abortions.”

Rolling Stone: “Trump and Vance Have Backed States That Want to Surveil Pregnant Women”

“Trump and his vice presidential pick are now both saying abortion should be left up to the states, even though they both previously signaled support for national bans. They have also, alarmingly, both suggested they would be OK with states moving to surveil women’s pregnancies.

“In May, a host at WGAL, an NBC affiliate in Pennsylvania, noted to Trump that there were ads running that suggested he would support certain states with bans monitoring women’s pregnancies. ‘Well, that would be up to the states, again,’ Trump responded…

“Vance, an Ohio senator, has gone further. Last summer, he signed onto a congressional letter calling on the Biden administration to withdraw a draft rule designed to prevent police in states with abortion bans from using personal health information to track and potentially charge people who travel to other states for abortion care.”

HHS Official Melanie Fontes Rainer: “If a person receives reproductive health care, such as a pregnancy test or treatment for an ectopic pregnancy, and that reproductive health care is lawful in the state where the care is received, the information about the care cannot be disclosed or used by the health care provider or health plan for an investigation, or to impose liability by law enforcement on the patient or the provider […] “No one should have to live in fear that their conversations with their doctor or that their medical claims data might be used to target or track them for seeking lawful reproductive health care.”

Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership, p. 497: “OCR should withdraw its Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) guidance on abortion. OCR should withdraw its June 2022 guidance that purports to address patient privacy concerns following the Dobbs decision but is actually a politicized statement in favor of abortion and against Dobbs. HIPAA covers patients in the womb, but this guidance treats them as nonpersons contrary to law. The guidance is unnecessary and contributes to ideologically motivated fearmongering about abortion after Dobbs.”

JD Vance and other Republicans’ comments on Proposed Rule: HIPAA Privacy Rule To Support Reproductive Health Care Privacy: “We write to express our concern regarding the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) proposed rule, ‘HIPAA Privacy Rule To Support Reproductive Health Care Privacy,’ 88 Fed. Reg. 23506 published on April 17, 2023 (the ‘Proposed Rule’), and to urge you to withdraw it immediately.

“Abortion is not health care—it is a brutal act that destroys the life of an unborn child and hurts women. Congress did not authorize HHS to extend special provisions for abortion such as these under the guise of ‘health care.’ 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. 

“The Proposed Rule creates special protections for abortion that limit cooperation with law enforcement, undermine the ability to report abuse, restrict the provision of public health information, and erase the humanity of unborn children…

“Sincerely… J.D. Vance United States Senator”

Project 2025’s calls to bulk up abortion surveillance come amid concerns about prosecutors seeking to enforce anti-abortion laws using reproductive health data from mobile apps.

Axios: “Why it matters: Health privacy in the post-Roe digital age is fraught as prosecutors seeking to enforce anti-abortion laws are free to go after reproductive health data in mobile apps, where it is unprotected by federal law.” Companies buy and sell sensitive health data, which is one concern; the unregulated use of personal data to enforce abortion bans is another. As many as one-third of women use digital tools to track their periods. That can be for reasons as simple as monitoring their cycles, planning to avoid a pregnancy or trying to conceive.”