Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a series of regulations designed to protect the privacy of people who travel out of state to receive abortions.
A 1996 federal law called the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is designed to protect Americans by ensuring that health care providers don’t disclose their private information. It provides limits on what type of health-related information can be disclosed without a patient’s authorization.
Strengthening HIPAA to protect those seeking abortions makes sense because officials in some states, notably Texas, have signaled a willingness to punish anyone who crosses the state border to get an abortion elsewhere. (Most abortions in Texas are now banned, but the law next door in New Mexico is much less restrictive.)
“Religion Clause” blog reported that last week, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a large, well-funded Christian Nationalist legal group, filed a lawsuit in federal court to block implementation of the new HIPAA rules.
The ADF is representing a physician in Dumas, Texas, who says she wants the ability to report “abuse” and raises the issue of transgender care for minors. But the ADF gives up the game in its press release, which states, “The rule undermines state laws that protect mothers and unborn children from the harms of abortion, and vulnerable children from dangerous and sterilizing procedures like puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and life-altering surgeries.”
In other words, this doctor is seeking the right to report anyone who gets a medical procedure she disapproves of – likely because of her religious beliefs – to government officials. These vulnerable patients are exactly the kind of people the HIPAA regulations are intended to protect.
When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, the issue of abortion policy landed in state legislatures, and some anti-abortion activists pretended that this is what they wanted all along. It’s not. They continue their efforts to make abortion illegal everywhere and engineer policies that would allow government officials to harass, intimidate and possibly punish anyone who gets an abortion in another state or helps someone do it.
These efforts, along with language in Project 2025 that calls for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to engage in “abortion surveillance” in “liberal states [that] have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism,” should send chills down our spines.
Christian Nationalists are essentially calling for the creation of a national spy network to stop Americans from receiving certain types of health care that offend their beliefs. Let’s call this what it is: religiously based fascism.
