Indiana abortionists want to keep their records secret

Melanie Garcia Lyon knows from experience that reading through Indiana Department of Health’s abortion reports can be emotional. In 2022, she and others with her organization, Voices for Life, started requesting and reviewing the state’s so-called terminated pregnancy reports (TPRs) that abortionists submit to the state after every abortion.

“Each TPR represents a dead baby and a mom and a dad that lost a baby,” Lyon, the group’s executive director, said. “Having to look through thousands of these is a really concrete, physical reminder of what abortion is.”

When reports indicated any sort of illegal activity involved in an abortion, Voices for Life submitted a complaint to the state health department and the Indiana attorney general’s office, sparking an investigation. Lyon said that, since 2022, the group has submitted 701 complaints about potential illegal activity. They’ve pointed to data that show deaths of women getting abortions, babies born alive after abortions, and abortions on minors that the abortionist had not adequately reported to the Indiana Department of Child Services.

Before Voices for Life did this work, complaints based on information from abortion reports resulted in the revocation of South Bend abortionist Ulrich Klopfer’s medical license. A few years later, after his death in 2019, Klopfer again made headlines when the bodies of 2,246 aborted babies were found in his garage.

Lyon said Voices for Life would get about 700-800 abortion reports a month. Before volunteers developed a computer program that automatically searches the documents and generates a report, staff and volunteers would spend probably six to eight hours each month sorting through the hundreds of documents, one at a time.

But all that came to a halt in 2023. In August, a law took effect protecting unborn children from abortion except in cases of serious risk to the mother, if the baby has an anomaly, or if the mother is a victim of rape or incest. The numbers of reported abortions in Indiana dropped significantly. After that, the health department stopped fulfilling the organization’s requests for the reports.

Now, the pro-life South Bend organization is nine months into a legal battle over access to the reports. Lyon and her fellow activists are waiting for a judge’s ruling, which could prevent them from viewing reports they say are essential to ensuring enforcement of the state’s protections for unborn babies. The health department and Indiana abortionists argue that the reports could enable activists to identify women who have received abortions under the state’s new law. But pro-life activists say reviewing the reports is not about catching women who abort but holding abortionists who violate state law accountable.

“I think there’s a reason that these doctors absolutely don’t want this information to get out to the public,” said Lyon.

According to the state’s recent quarterly aggregated reports, at least two babies were born alive following attempted abortions, and reports for three abortions came in more than 30 days after the procedure in violation of Indiana law. Abortionists reported more than 100 abortions in the first three quarters of 2024 alone, and all of the recorded chemical abortions took place after the legal limit of eight weeks post-fertilization set in the state law.

Voices for Life has not seen any of the individual reports since the new law took effect. According to the group’s May 2024 complaint, it took the health department almost 90 days after Voices for Life requested the August 2023 reports to inform the group that it would no longer release the individual terminated pregnancy reports. The notification cited an informal December 2023 opinion from Indiana’s public access counselor stating that the reports counted as private patient medical records.

Before and after the new pro-life law took effect, the state required abortionists to share extensive information about the woman undergoing the abortion, including her age, marital status, county of residence, and the date of her last menstrual period. It also asked for the age and gender of the unborn baby and the name of the abortionist. The reports never included the woman’s name or other personal identifying information. But Public Access Counselor Luke Britt agreed with the health department’s chief legal counsel that the information in the reports “could be reverse engineered to identify patients—especially in smaller communities.”

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita issued an opinion in April rejecting Britt’s conclusion, noting that the health department had never treated the abortion reports as private medical records. He explained in a news conference that the records had been publicly available since the 1970s and that they played a crucial role in allowing his office to enforce the state’s pro-life laws. “The enforcement authority that we have at the attorney general’s office isn’t universal in the respect that we can rove around the state and enforce against doctors willy-nilly,” Rokita said. “We wait for a properly filed complaint.” A complaint about an abortionist, he said, has to come from the public, since state law bars his office from filing complaints against individuals with “regulated occupations,” such as licensed physicians.

“The public has to rely on evidence,” he continued. “The evidence comes from what has always been, these publicly available, terminated pregnancy reports.”

But the health department still refused to share the reports with Voices for Life. Represented by the pro-life Thomas More Society, Voices for Life sued the department in May 2024.

The court dismissed the case in September, but Voices for Life appealed. The case was ongoing when newly elected Republican Gov. Mike Braun signed an executive order in January mandating that all state agencies “fully cooperate with the office of the attorney general in the investigation and enforcement of the state of Indiana’s abortion laws.” Earlier this month, the Thomas More Society announced that Voices for Life had reached a settlement with the health department, which would “now release TPRs upon lawful request and not designate the reports as confidential medical records.”

In the settlement, Voices for Life agreed to let the health department redact certain information from the reports, including the race, educational status, marital status, and county of residence of the mother who received the abortion. That information, Voices for Life’s Lyon said, is “just not relevant for enforcement purposes. Our goal is to hold the provider accountable. We don’t need that information about the patient.”

But the victory was short-lived. Two days after Thomas More Society announced the settlement, two Indiana abortionists sued, requesting that the court affirm the reports as private medical records, and asked for a temporary restraining order to keep the department from releasing the documents. The abortionists also requested that Voices for Life destroy any of the reports it had already received under the settlement, although Lyon told WORLD the health department had not yet handed over any reports. The court held a hearing in the case on Feb. 11, and the judge could rule any day.

One of the abortionists is Caitlin Bernard. She made national headlines in 2022 after telling a reporter that she had aborted the unborn baby of a 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio. The Indiana Medical Licensing Board in 2023 concluded that Bernard had violated the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) by divulging information about the patient’s age, state of residence, the gestational age of the baby, and details about her referral. That was enough information for members of the media to ultimately identify the girl and her rapist. The lawsuit noted that all of this information is required in the state’s abortion reports.

Benjamin Horvath, a Voices for Life founding member and South Bend attorney representing the organization, said there’s a key difference between Bernard’s case and a situation involving a pro-life group obtaining the state’s abortion reports. “Usually these things are only reported to the Department of Health and then subject to public records requests from outside groups. But Dr. Bernard just went directly to the media,” Horvath said.

He said the practice of pro-life groups requesting state abortion reports has been going on for a long time, but “as far as we know, that’s the only instance they can point to of this happening. And it wasn’t because of a TPR. It was because of information that was given by the doctor to the media.”