Missouri Republican lawmakers have introduced legislation that creates registrations for pregnant women who are “at risk” to have abortions. This is a proposal characterized as “eharmony for babies” that helps the bill’s authors match adoptive parents and babies.
If passed, the bill will create two registries. One is for people who are “at risk” abortions, and the other is for those who are about to adopt them. Members of each registry have access to the other party, but Missouri government officials are tasked with helping members meet each other and promote adoption. The bill’s goal is to “reduce the number of preventable abortions in Missouri.”
“Mothers who choose to raise their children for adoption must match their adoption parents,” said Gerard Harms, an adoption lawyer and author of the Save Mo Babies Act, on Tuesday, Missouri. He testified at a hearing by the State Legislature Committee. “That’s this database.”
The bill does not define what makes someone “in danger” into abortion.
The Save Mo Babies Act is the latest in a series of anti-abortion efforts to expand government tracing of pregnant women and abortion patients. Project 2025, a well-known conservative policy playbook, expands “surveillance” by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which forces the state to “force how many abortions occur within its boundaries at a child’s gestational age. It suggested that the condition of the mother, and by what method, information on the treatment that could result in miscarriage, stillbirth, and “causally resulting in the death of the child (“chemotherapy)” ”
Project 2025 also proposes Joe Biden-era guidance to use the Portability and Accountability Act of Health Insurance (HIPAA), a US law that governs patient privacy, to help healthcare providers enter law enforcement I suggest narrowing the situation where you can talk to them. abortion. While still a senator, JD Vance signed a letter denounced the guidance. Alliance Defending Freedom is also a conservative legal group that led most of the right-wing attacks on abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, and is also pleading about it.
In an interview with Time last year, Donald Trump shows that the state is open to monitoring women’s pregnancy and checking if they have had an abortion. “I think they might do that,” he said: “The state is going to say. It doesn’t matter if I’m comfortable or not.” (He later tried to return that statement.)
At the state level, Indiana is caught up in a legal battle over abortion patient records. The state’s Republican governor and local anti-abortion groups are trying to access records about a small number of people who have recently undergone procedures in Indiana. (The state only allows abortion in the event of rape, incest, or medical emergency.) The judge ruled this week that it would block the release of records.
If the abortion prevention group obtains records, the judge said, “It will be free to publish them on the internet and further publish these medical records, including depriving patients of privacy.
On Tuesday, Harms suggested that people misunderstood his intentions when writing the bill. The proposed Missouri register is not “an attempt to go out and do data mines,” he said. Instead, he suggested that abortion clinics could attend on their own so that patients could provide information about the registry.
“This is a completely spontaneous program when it comes to the parents of these children,” he said.
The bill Harms added was “decisively drafted” and suggested lawmakers should fine-tune the legislation.
It is not clear whether the bill will move forward. But Missouri Republican state lawmakers have introduced other barrages of abortion restrictions, including a law that rolled back the November voting law that added abortion rights to the state constitution.
Over the past few months, Missouri has moved to the epicenter of the national war over the process. After the November voting measures passed, abortion providers pleaded to break the state’s near-concurrent abortion ban and many other restrictions on procedures. Abortions eventually resumed in the state this week.
