Gov. Hobbs urges Arizona to stop collecting abortion data, citing patient privacy

PHOENIX - Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs is calling for legislators to repeal the state law that requires an annual abortion report, saying that it infringes on patients’ privacy, which echoes other Democratic officials’ push to reduce or eliminate such requirements.

"The government has no place in surveilling Arizonans’ medical decision-making or tracking their health history," Hobbs, a Democrat in a state where Republicans control the Legislature, said in a statement Wednesday as the state released its report covering 2023. "Starting a family is a sensitive and personal experience for a woman and her loved ones; there should be no room for government surveillance and publication of that decision."

Hobbs is not the only one concerned about the collection of abortion data, especially as Donald Trump prepares to take over as president again, when he could implement policies that are hostile, or at least less favorable, to abortion rights.

"It’s really worth thinking carefully about the risk and the benefit of collecting data in this new environment," said Isaac Maddow-Zimet, a researcher at the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights and does its own voluntary surveys of abortion providers.

A handful of Democratic-controlled states have reduced reporting requirements in recent years out of concern about privacy and also considering the burden it puts on providers to collect it all. Republican-run states generally ask for a lot, though many of them have banned abortion at all stages of pregnancy or after roughly the first six weeks, before many people know they’re pregnant.

Michigan just released 2023 abortion data but is not collecting it at all going forward. Illinois has switched to aggregate reporting instead of requiring providers to send information about each individual abortion. Minnesota has reduced the number of questions they require to be tallied, eliminating data on marital status, race and ethnicity, among others.

New York City has also cut back on asking the patient demographics questions.

Abortion access has been shifting around the country since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 and ended a nationwide right to abortion.

Starting in the months before the Supreme Court ruling was released, the Society of Family Planning, which advocates for abortion rights, launched regular surveys of abortion providers about their work and has generally released the results quarterly. One of the lead researchers, University of California, San Francisco, public health social scientist Ushma Upadhyay, said the next report won’t come out as soon as it otherwise might have.

"We are delaying our next release to give providers time to adjust to the tenor of the new administration," she said, noting that she hopes providers continue to participate in the survey.

Over the past two years, the report has shown that while abortions have become rare in the states where bans are in place, they’ve increased slightly overall as people travel for procedures or obtain pills via telemedicine.

Arizona’s policy changes have been more turbulent than most. Providers stopped offering abortions in 2022 amid legal questions about whether an 1864 ban on nearly all abortions was valid, then resumed them. Earlier this year, the state Supreme Court ruled that the old law could be enforced, but then put the start of enforcement on hold. Before it took effect, the state — aided by some GOP lawmakers joining Democrats — repealed the old law. And in November, voters added a right to abortion to the state constitution.

The Arizona data made public on Wednesday reflects the policy changes — with the state going from just under 14,000 abortions in 2021 to 11,400 in 2022 to 12,700 last year. The 2024 numbers are not in the state’s report, which is published by the Department of Health Services.

The report began with voluntary participation from licensed providers in 1976 and became mandatory in 2010. The state collects detailed information, including whether minors have parental consent, as well as the age, marital status, and race and ethnicity of the patient. It also reports how many previous abortions and live births the patient has had, how far along in pregnancy she was, and whether the abortion involved a procedure or pills. But the data does not include the patient’s name, address, birthdate or Social Security number.

For years, four states with generally expansive abortion rights laws have skipped participating in the federal government’s roundup of state data. California and Maryland don’t collect the data. New Hampshire and New Jersey make it voluntary for hospitals and other providers to supply it.

Rachel Rebouche, dean of the Temple University Beasley School of Law and an abortion law scholar, said states don’t need to know personal information such as the name and address of people who receive abortions. And while it’s useful to report basic information about abortion, she said, there are risks for abortion rights advocates, particularly in the reports from states with bans where the data mostly shows how often abortions are provided through exceptions.

"The tension we find ourselves in is patient privacy," she said, "but also the looming allegation that exceptions are being misused."