Missouri lawmaker proposes registry of pregnant women ‘at risk' for abortions
A Republican lawmaker in Missouri has introduced legislation to create a registry of pregnant women who are 'at risk' of having an abortion – a proposal the bill's author characterized as an 'eHarmony for babies' that could also help match adoptive parents with babies.
If passed, the bill would create two registries: one for people 'at risk' of abortions and one for people looking to adopt. Members of each registry could access the other, while Missouri government officials would be tasked with helping members meet each other and facilitating adoptions. The bill's goal is to 'reduce the number of preventable abortions in Missouri'.
'Mothers who choose to put their children up for adoption need to match with prospective adoptive parents,' Gerard Harms, an adoption attorney and the author of the Save MO Babies Act, testified in a Missouri state legislative committee hearing on Tuesday. 'That's what this database is.'
The bill does not define what puts someone 'at risk' of abortion.
The Save MO Babies Act is the latest in a series of anti-abortion efforts to expand government tracking of pregnant women and abortion patients. Project 2025, the famous conservative policy playbook, suggested that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expand its 'surveillance' to force states to turn over data on 'exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother's state of residence, and by what method', as well as information on miscarriages, stillbirths, and 'treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy)'.
Project 2025 also proposes rolling back Joe Biden-era guidance that uses the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (Hipaa), the US law governing patient privacy, to narrow the circumstances under which healthcare providers can talk to law enforcement about patients who may have undergone abortions. While still a senator, JD Vance signed on to a letter condemning the guidance. Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal group that has spearheaded much of the rightwing attack on abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, has also sued over it.
In an interview with Time last year, Donald Trump signaled that he would be open to letting states monitor women's pregnancies to ascertain whether they had undergone abortions. 'I think they might do that,' he said, adding: 'The states are going to say. It's irrelevant whether I'm comfortable or not.' (He later tried to walk that statement back.)
At the state level, Indiana is embroiled in a legal battle over abortion patients' records, as the state's Republican governor and a local anti-abortion group have sought to access records about the few people who have managed to recently undergo the procedure in Indiana. (The state only permits abortions in cases of rape, incest or medical emergency.) A judge ruled this week to block the records' release.
If the anti-abortion group obtains the records, the judge wrote, 'it will be free to publicize those medical records further, including by posting them on the Internet, depriving patients of their privacy, which cannot be adequately remedied through money damages'.
On Tuesday, Harms suggested that people had misunderstood his intentions in writing the bill. The proposed Missouri registry, he said, was not an attempt 'to go out and data-mine'. Instead, he suggested that abortion clinics could provide patients with information about the registry so they could join it on their own.
'This is a completely voluntary program as it comes to the parents of these children,' he said.
The bill, Harms added, was 'inartfully drafted' and suggested that lawmakers should fine-tune the legislation.
It is not clear whether the bill will move forward. But Missouri Republican state lawmakers have introduced a barrage of other abortion restrictions, including legislation to roll back a November ballot measure that added abortion rights to the state constitution.
Missouri has moved to the epicenter of the national war over the procedure over the last few months. After the passage of the November ballot measure, abortion providers sued to strike down the state's near-total abortion ban and a raft of other restrictions on the procedure. Abortions finally resumed in the state this week.
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