New federal rule shields patients’ abortion records

A new federal rule will protect the records of patients who seek legal abortions in other states from criminal investigators, two leading U.S. health officials said Tuesday during a visit to Phoenix.

Melanie Fontes Rainer, an Arizona native who is director of the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, visited Phoenix to promote the new rule along with Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra.

The visit by Becerra and Fontes Rainer to Planned Parenthood Arizona’s central Phoenix location came in the midst of chaos, anger and fear over a looming near-total abortion ban in Arizona that makes no exceptions for rape or incest. Republicans in the state House of Representatives last week blocked an effort to repeal the law.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision in 2022 means that patients, providers and medical organizations are now worried and, in some cases, hesitant about their ability to access care and to speak about reproductive health, including abortions, Fontes Rainer said.

“They are worried about state agencies, law enforcement and others using their medical records for non-health care purposes,” she said. “No one should live in fear that their conversations with their doctors or that their medical claims data will be used to track or target them for seeking lawful reproductive health care.”

Some GOP leaders want patients’ reproductive health information

The rule, announced this week by the Biden administration, enhances the Health Insurance Portability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) Privacy Rule by prohibiting the disclosure of protected health information related to lawful reproductive health care.

Among other things, the rule requires regulated health care providers to obtain a signed attestation that requests for protected health care information related to reproductive health care are not for the prohibited purposes of investigating or imposing liability on anyone giving, receiving or facilitating legal reproductive health care.

Fontes Rainer, who has been visiting states such as Arizona with restrictive abortion bans, said raising awareness of the rule is a chance to educate the public about their right to medical privacy.

“Privacy is not a partisan issue,” Fontes Rainer told The Arizona Republic in an interview. “The fact that we are in a place where we have to do a rule like this because people are tracking the kind of health care you get, even when you leave your state to go somewhere else, I think should be shocking to people across the country.”

Some GOP leaders have insisted they need access to patients’ reproductive health care information to ensure that their states’ abortion restrictions are effective, and conservatives have characterized the new rule as overreach, the Washington Post reported Monday.

Federal health officials said they issued the rule after hearing from communities that changes were needed to protect patient confidentiality and to ensure that the medical records of people seeking legal reproductive health care are not weaponized against them.

Official: Pregnant people have lost rights, but not right to privacy

Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling, women have been denied care they need, young girls who were raped have had to leave their own states to get the care they need and families trying to have babies through IVF “were stopped in their tracks,” all because the rights that women had since 1973 were gone, Becerra said.

Though women lost access to care, they did not lose their right to privacy, he said.

“No one has the right to share your personal, private, confidential, very important medical information without permission through law,” he said.

Reach health care reporter Stephanie Innes at Stephanie.Innes@gannett.com or follow her on X, formerly Twitter: @stephanieinnes.