Research group says state-mandated abortion data collection should be revisited

Hospitals, abortion providers, and other medical clinics have long been required by state law and local health departments to report the numbers and types of legal abortions that are done in their states. However, in response to what it calls a more hostile climate for abortion rights, a leading abortion advocacy group has crafted suggestions for an alternative way of collecting this important data. 

In a policy analysis released in March, the Guttmacher Institute, a research group dedicated to furthering reproductive health care, said: “The current climate has escalated the risk of mandated data collection being used to stigmatize, harass, or even prosecute abortion patients and providers—including in situations where abortion care is provided and obtained legally.”

Guttmacher wrote that since the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, the risks outweigh the benefits when it comes to state-mandated reporting. 

Guttmacher is proposing to repeal or reform the kind of state-mandated reporting that currently exists. 

“To prevent further harms, policymakers at all levels of government should work to remove existing reporting requirements and vigorously oppose new ones, along with any attempt to tie federal funding to abortion reporting,” the Guttmacher analysis reads. 

Guttmacher recommends new ways of gathering the reporting, which include: making surveys voluntary; assessing whether or not the state-wide abortion reporting can prove an improvement in health policy or medical practices;, auditing survey questions to make sure a patient’s identity is not revealed; and consulting abortion providers on how best to report the data while not penalizing them if they do not participate in reporting. 

“This kind of [state-mandated reporting] has always had a complicated history, because it can serve, on one hand, an important public health purpose, and even pre-Dobbs, it was often weaponized by more hostile states to really make providing care much more difficult and insert the state government into the patient-provider relationship,” said Isaac Maddow-Zimet, a data scientist at the Guttmacher Institute. 

Maddow-Zimet also said that post-Dobbs, concerns are rising. 

“Providers and patients are really operating in just a heightened environment of risk, and both of them are feeling more sensitive about the possibility of data breaches of what data they collect,” Maddow-Zimet said, adding that a lot of providers aren’t collecting as much data as they once were. 

Currently, 46 states and the District of Columbia mandate some form of abortion reporting. How the data is collected and who it is reported to varies by state. Some states collect zip codes from patients, and other states report a patient’s marital status. 

Indiana has attempted to make individual abortion data public. In January 2025, Gov. Mike Braun signed an executive order requiring that health care providers submit records of terminated pregnancies to the Indiana Department of Health. In February, in response to a lawsuit filed by two ob-gyns, Marion County Superior Court Judge James A. Joven temporarily blocked the release of the records. 

The collected abortion information has been voluntarily shared with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since 1969 and has been used to create the agency’s annual Abortion Surveillance report. The report publishes the results of reviews of reproductive programs, evaluations of clinical patterns related to abortion, and tracking of the number of births and pregnancy losses, including those that end in abortion. 

The CDC reports are issued with a two-year lag, and four states — Maryland, California, Michigan, and New Jersey — do not require abortion data reporting. 

Maddow-Zimet says that in reality, how people are obtaining abortions post-Dobbs — ordering abortion pills via telehealth and through the mail and traveling out of states with bans — isn’t being captured through data collection. 

“So, you end up with a situation where, at the same time as there is this period arguably of heightened risk and sensitivity for this data, the data is also potentially just capturing less and less of the reality of abortion care on the ground,” Maddow-Zimet said. “The ways people access abortion care are much more varied than they have been in the past, and without a lot of creative work and thinking about how to best estimate and collect those data, these kind of historical mandates of reporting are just going to capture fewer and fewer.” 

Maddow-Zemet said it’s important to understand that research groups such as Guttmacher are not saying that data shouldn’t be collected at all. .” 

“This is an invitation for us to think together as a field about how best to reflect the reality of abortion care, get good numbers, and also do it in a way that doesn’t put patients and providers at risk and doesn’t create a burden of reporting,” he said.