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(HealthNewsDigest.com) – A quiet evolution is taking place in the nation’s abortion battle, ProPublica’s Charles Ornstein writes. Increasingly, abortion opponents are pursuing personal and medical information on women undergoing abortions and the doctors who perform them, often filing complaints with authorities based on what they learn.
Abortion opponents insist their tactics are meant to uncover incidents involving patients who may have been harmed by poor care. But those who support abortion rights say the ultimate aim of these activists is to reduce abortions by intimidating women and their doctors — using the loss of privacy as a weapon.
Key takeaways from Ornstein’s report, co-published with the Washington Post:
- In recent years, abortion opponents have become experts at accessing public records such as recordings of 911 calls and autopsy reports, then publishing the information on their websites.
- They also collect information leaked by sympathetic health care workers who are required to keep patient information confidential under HIPAA. The law, however, doesn’t apply to advocacy groups and anti-abortion activists have used the leaked data to bolster complaints they submit to health agencies against abortion providers.
- Founded or not, these complaints can trigger investigations that cause additional details about the patients to be made public — compounding their grief with further loss of privacy.
More in the full story here: http://www.propublica.org/
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