Friday Open Thread

2 thoughts on “Friday Open Thread”

1. Welcome to the Menstrual Police State. Josh Marshall at TPM

   JD Vance is a major menstrual surveillance hawk.

   You knew it was coming. I wonder what HIPPA has to say about that.

   It’s not enough for many anti-abortion stalwarts to ban the procedure in their state. They want to ban legal drugs designed to induce abortion. They want to surveil and block women traveling to other states to obtain an abortion. One of the most threatening dimensions of these programs is that they threaten to make doctors and other medical professionals — who might give counsel on or simply know about a woman’s plans to obtain an abortion — responsible for reporting her actions. If you visit your OB-GYN and discuss traveling to another state to get an abortion, does your OB have to report you to the local sheriff? It applies to third parties who might assist a woman either in traveling to get an abortion or getting FDA-approved medications to induce an abortion at home. The cases we’ve already seen range the gamut from sheriff’s departments wanting to pull medical and travel records for evidence of pregnancies that ended for unexplained reasons, gaps in menstruation, trips out of state that coincided with a pregnancy not brought to term.

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   1. When the Biden administration pushed for updated HIPAA regulations to prevent Sheriff’s Departments and other law enforcement agencies from pulling women’s medical records for their menstrual surveillance programs (which they termed “compassionate laws protecting unborn children and their mothers”) Vance was one of only 28 members of Congress (and only 8 senators) to sign a letter protesting the new regs which “interfere with valid state laws protecting life.” (You can see the letter here. It’s a doozy.)

      Think about those numbers. Out of all the crazies in the House Republican caucus and among the 49 Republican senators, they couldn’t even get thirty people to sign this thing.

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