Criminalizing People

JD Vance Has Supported Criminalizing People Seeking Abortions

His strategy? Using medical records to investigate those who travel out of state for the service.

Sarah Szilagy

Donald Trump may seek to obfuscate his stance on abortion and distance himself from Project 2025’s ultraconservative policy goals, but the anti-abortion record of his vice presidential pick is impossible to hide.

Ohio Sen. JD Vance has previously argued against abortion ban exceptions for rape and incest, supported the use of the Comstock Act to criminalize sending abortion medications in the mail, and called for a national abortion ban. “I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally,” Vance said on a podcast in 2022 when running for the Senate.

Add to that his recent support for the use of patients’ medical records by the police to investigate people who travel out of state for abortions. In a letter sent in June 2023 to the head of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Vance and 29 other Republican lawmakers urged HHS to reverse course on its recently finalized rule that protected patients’ reproductive healthcare information from law enforcement, particularly when patients travel to access lawful abortion care.

“Abortion is not health care—it is a brutal act that destroys the life of an unborn child and hurts women,” the letter reads. “​The Proposed Rule unlawfully thwarts the enforcement of compassionate laws protecting unborn children and their mothers, and directs health care providers to defy lawful court orders and search warrants.”

The rule, which became effective June 24, modifies privacy regulations under the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). HIPAA protects patients’ protected health information (PHI) from disclosure but generally makes allowances for court orders or law enforcement investigations. Under the new rule, medical providers, health plans, and clearinghouses cannot share health information to assist in criminal, civil, or administrative investigations related to the “mere act of seeking, obtaining, providing, or facilitating reproductive health care.” It specifically protects patients who travel to states where abortion is legal and instances in which federal laws like EMTALA require abortion care.

The HHS notes that Dobbs and the flood of abortion restrictions that states have enacted since then “increase the potential that use and disclosure of PHI about an individual’s reproductive health will undermine access to and the quality of health care generally.” In response, the conservative lawmakers call the rule “ideologically motivated fearmongering about abortion after Dobbs.” In fact, the concern is not hypothetical; Idaho and several other states have passed laws criminalizing assistance to minors seeking to travel out of state for abortion care. Meanwhile, some conservative state attorneys general have threatened to prosecute abortion funds.

The call to rescind the rule is just one of many anti-abortion proposals found in the pages of Project 2025’s policy book, which until recently was viewed as the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the next Trump administration. Trump’s campaign has disavowed Project 2025, but its rhetoric and goals live on in Vance’s own anti-abortion proclivities. While the GOP and Trump have attempted to soften the image of their anti-abortion goals, as my colleague Julianne McShane has reported, opposing abortion is very much still part of the plan. That includes using the Fourteenth Amendment to establish “fetal personhood” and federally outlaw abortion.

The Democratic National Committee responded sharply to Vance’s prior calls to rescind the rule. As DNC National Press Secretary Emilia Rowland said in a statement, the Trump and Vance ticket would call “for every abortion, miscarriage, stillbirth, and incidental pregnancy loss from medical treatments like chemo to be reported to the federal government…tearing away health data privacy protections under HIPAA, and allowing states to surveil patients and doctors, monitor pregnancies, restrict women’s freedom to travel for abortion care, and ultimately use health data against patients and providers in court. This isn’t about policy, it’s about control.”