Tennessee calls for abortion data from hospitals in case of banning ban United States news
The Office of the Public Prosecutor in Tennessee summoned four medical groups in the state for abortion records that have been conducted over the past few years as part of a lawsuit on the exceptions of the prohibition of abortion near the state, the documents of the court obtained by the Guardian Exhibition.
The four summonses were issued this spring to the Medical Center of the University of Vanderbelt and a hospital in Tennessee run by the National Catholic series, as well as two smaller medical practices in Tennessee, medical heritage partners and the women’s group in Franklin.
Although every summons matter is different, they are asking these organizations widely to deliver intensive information about cases in which abortions may have provided abortion, including the number of abortion completed since 2022, and in some notes of the notes, all “documents and communications” related to this abortion.
When and if medical service providers run the records, they are legally allowed to maintain the “patient’s secrecy according to necessity”, according to the summons deputy. A preventive order was also issued to prevent records from using them to investigate hospitals and medical services providers outside the case, in addition to determining the unknown patient records as “secret”.
Comprehensive requests raise questions about the attempts of the red countries to track the abortion providers in the post -ROE V Wade us. In the three years of the United States Supreme Court, reproductive rights activists have grown increasingly from government efforts to collect information about abortion, especially since the states such as Louisiana and Texas recently made efforts to abortion service providers.
Mary Ziegler, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who is studying the legal history of reproduction, shared her concerns that the memoirs of Tennessee can have a “tremendous influence”.
“Republican lawmakers have realized that doctors are already doing procedures that they – the Republican lawmakers – say they are justified in lights.”
“The message that is sent here is that every one decision, even those that would have been legally, will be guessed per second.”
The call notes were issued as part of a lawsuit in 2023 filed by many Tennessee women and doctors who seek to expand exceptions to ban abortion in the state. Although Tennessee – like every other state with a prohibition of miscarriage – allows technically to abort in medical emergencies, these women say that they are deprived of medical abortion. Doctors all over the country said that the exceptions included in the prohibition of miscarriage are so vibrant that they are not compatible with medical standards, forcing doctors to delay or refuse to care so that the patient becomes sick enough to qualify a law for treatment.
At least five pregnant women And according to what was reported, he died Under abortion, a ban in Georgia and Texas. In the years after the fall of ROE, more Texas women began to diagnose her infection-a life-threatening condition-or almost nurtured to death after abortion, According to reports by propublica.
Tennessee’s lawyer, however, He said in court The abortion of the state’s abortion is applicable as written. Tennessee said that some doctors’ failure to explain the law accurately does not justify amending the prohibition of the state, especially since the state legislature approved a draft law in 2025, which sought to clarify the conditions in which people can get aborted.
The summons issued by the medical services providers are required to hand over “all protocols, policies, instructions, practice guides or brochures” that they used to determine whether patients can obtain abortion. It also requests to summon Vanderbelt records from Abortion Committee at Nashville HospitalWhich corresponds to whether it is and how to provide legal abortion for patients, including “documents and communications” that may reveal the solution to each case it was considered by the committee.
Other call notes have been issued for at least one medical practice, employing Dr. Tennessee, who is part of the lawsuit. They are asking for these practices to calculate the number of abortion they have made since 2020, two years before the fall of ROE. They also ask for records from cases where doctors did not perform abortion because they felt that a Tennessee banned from doing so.
The groups that summoned the Tennessee Prosecutor’s Office did not respond to the suspension requests.
Despite the protection of the in force in the applicant to preserve the records that have been summoned from the leak, assurances from state officials may not be sufficient to put out the doctors ’fears of prosecution, Ziegler said. She pointed to the case of Adriana Smith, a distinguished woman in the brain in Georgia who was still supporting life, even gave birth to a child through a Caesarean section in June. While the Georgia Public Prosecutor said that the prohibition of semi -state abortion did not force the doctors to keep pregnant women to support life, Smith’s doctors felt that the ban language was so strict that they still had a choice but to keep it alive.
“Before any of these data requests, many doctors and service providers were really concerned about civil or criminal responsibility,” Ziegler said. “I don’t see how this will help.”