Beware JD's menstruation police.

[22lcidw]

Trump Camp Says State Menstrual Surveillance Programs are A-OK​

One of the most toxic and politically explosive parts of the current abortion rights debate is tied the complexities and perhaps inanities of leaving national abortion policy up to individual states. And a comment yesterday from Trump spokesman Jason Miller put the question right back into the center of the campaign.

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.

JD Vance is a major menstrual surveillance hawk. 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, per the letter, “interfere with valid state laws protecting life.” (You can see the letter here. It’s a doozy.)

Trump Camp Says State Menstrual Surveillance Programs are A-OK

One of the most toxic and politically explosive parts of the current abortion rights debate is tied the complexities and perhaps inanities of leaving national abortion policy up to individual states.

talkingpointsmemo.com

This spring, HHS finalized new regulations under HIPAA to limit law enforcement access to medical records tied to reproductive health. The rule was first proposed in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision as a way to limit the ability of state and local law enforcement agencies to access medical records to stymie or criminalize access to legal reproductive health services, most specifically abortions, but not only abortions. It also applies to contraception and the full range of other endangered reproductive care.

So for instance, consider the ability of a woman from an abortion-ban state to travel to another state to get a legal abortion, or her ability to receive legal abortion drugs through the mail. The news has been filled with proposed or actual laws which would attempt to restrict travel to receive abortions in other states, charge those who travel or criminalize those who might facilitate such travel or facilitate the legal shipment of prescribed abortion drugs through the mail. Of course, local police agencies might simply take it upon themselves to pull records to see who had unexplained disruptions to their menstrual cycles.

Your local sheriff might just want to know.

And so does JD Vance, it turns out.

JD Vance, Menstrual Surveillance Hawk

This spring, HHS finalized new regulations under HIPAA to limit law enforcement access to medical records tied to reproductive health. The rule was first proposed in the aftermath of the Dobbs…

talkingpointsmemo.com

If you live in a women's rights gulag state like TX, get pregnant, take a vacation out of state, come back not pregnant, do you risk arrest? If the majority of voters in your state want to make it a criminal act to cross the border to get an abortion that would be okay with trump's SC and the fat, orange guy as well.

One hopes the wisdom and will of the majority will prevail here. But then Repubs keep finding ways to thwart the will of the majority all the time.

Meanwhile everything we build takes longer and is more expensive. Turning abortion into a mountain when it is a molehill.