CV NEWS FEED // An Indiana pro-life group recently filed a lawsuit against the state’s Department of Health for withholding access to abortion records, which until December 2023 were released as public information.
According to the lawsuit, the Indiana Department of Health (IDOH) changed its public records release procedure in December 2023 and withheld Terminated Pregnancy Reports (TPRs) from pro-life organization Voices for Life, citing “patient privacy.”
The change came after Public Access Counselor Luke Britt released an informal opinion arguing that TPRs are patient medical records that cannot be released. Prior to Britt’s non-binding opinion, TPRs were classified as public records and were released to Voices for Life with potentially sensitive or patient-identifying information redacted.
The Indiana Capital Chronicle reported that Melanie Garcia Lyon, executive director of Voices for Life, said at a May 1 news conference that IDOH’s withholding of TPRs isn’t due to concerns about privacy.
“Accessing these reports has always been about evaluating provider compliance with Indiana abortion law,” she said, according to the Indiana Capital Chronicle. “If this were truly a privacy concern, the health department could easily redact info on these reports. But this isn’t about protecting women’s privacy. This is about protecting dangerous abortion providers from public scrutiny and allowing them to continue to operate without consequences for legal action.”
In the lawsuit, Voices for Life cited Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita’s April 11 opinion, which accused IDOH and Britt of collusion and argued that TPRs are indeed public records.
“Although the term ‘medical record’ is not defined, its ordinary meaning and context indicate that the term refers to confidential patient records maintained by providers for diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis. TPRs do not fall into that category. TPRs are reports submitted to a public agency for purposes of evaluating compliance with state statutes governing abortion,” Rokita had said.
Rokita had added that continuing to redact potentially sensitive information would mitigate any concerns regarding patient identification.
According to the lawsuit, Voices for Life has requested TPRs from the Indiana Department of Health (IDOH) every month since November 2022, monitoring them for any illegal actions committed by abortion providers.
The Indiana Capital Chronicle reported that Voices for Life’s enforcement team has since submitted complaints concerning 701 apparent illegal incidents discovered when reading the reports.
According to the lawsuit, Voices for Life received TPRs—with any potential patient identifying information redacted—from IDOH until October 2023. At that time, IDOH termed a TPR request as “pending review” and delayed it, citing a high volume of public records requests as the reason.
Voices for Life additionally made TPR requests in September and November that were also delayed.
IDOH delayed the requests until January 2024, when it cited Britt’s opinion and informed Voices for Life that TPRs are no longer considered public records. IDOH had previously begun withholding certain information in August 2023, after the state almost totally banned abortion.
The Indiana Capital Chronicle reported that IDOH was worried fewer TPRs would make it easier to identify women getting abortions, as the TPRs provide data about a woman’s age, education, marital status, race, and ethnicity, as well as information about the date of the abortion and the baby’s gestational age.
Voices for Life attorney Benjamin Horvath said that the lack of transparency now surrounding TPRs is concerning.
“We are not after patient information,” Horvath said, according to the Indiana Capital Chronicle. “It really is about the physician performing the abortion—where are they performing it? And then Voices for Life is able to carry out its mission, having access to it.”
