Reproductive Freedom

Reproductive freedom demands more than a return to the days before Dobbs. Following the lead of the Reproductive Freedom Caucus, I will fight for a comprehensive legislative agenda that goes beyond restoring what our broken courts took away: expanding access and ensuring affordability for all, and putting in place robust federal protections for every patient and provider in this country. This means cracking down on crisis pregnancy centers and surveillance-industry incursions into medical care. And it means court reform.

Abortion Bans Kill

Women in states with abortion bans are nearly twice as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes as women in states where abortion is legal.¹ A ProPublica analysis of seven years of hospital records found that sepsis rates among women hospitalized for second-trimester pregnancy loss jumped more than 50 percent after Texas’s abortion ban took effect.²

At least nine people are known to have been killed by abortion bans since 2022.³ The total number of victims was estimated at 59 or more as of June 2025, a full year ago.⁴

This is happening inside hospitals, as doctors are legally compelled to defer and deny care for pregnant patients. The Women’s Health Protection Act of 2025 (H.R. 12), introduced by Rep. Judy Chu, would establish a nationwide statutory right for clinicians to provide, and patients to receive, abortion care.⁵ It is a baseline for reproductive freedom.

Surveilled and Attacked

Commercial surveillance and federal inaction on digital privacy now mean that location data, health-app records, and digital histories can be used to target patients who seek abortion care, as well as the doctors who provide it. Because most app and web data falls outside HIPAA’s protections, a largely unregulated broker market lets almost anyone acquire sensitive information,⁶ all while surveillance grows cheaper, faster, and harder to escape.

In Nebraska in 2022, seventeen-year-old Celeste Burgess and her mother Jessica were charged when Meta turned their private Facebook messages over to police. Celeste was tried as an adult and served ninety days in jail for using abortion medication. Jessica Burgess received a sentence of two years for helping her daughter.⁷

In 2023, an anti-abortion group used the data broker Near Intelligence to geofence roughly 600 Planned Parenthood clinics across 48 states and serve their visitors targeted ads.⁸ In 2025, a Texas sheriff’s office ran a nationwide search across roughly 83,000 Flock cameras to collect evidence of a woman’s self-managed abortion.⁹

In 2025, too, a Louisiana grand jury indicted Dr. Margaret Carpenter of New York on felony charges for prescribing abortion medication by telemedicine. Though protected from extradition, a felony indictment means Dr. Carpenter still cannot travel freely.¹⁰ She risks detention the moment she enters the wrong state, and physicians everywhere feel the chilling effect. The Ensuring Women’s Right to Reproductive Freedom Act (H.R. 4099), introduced by Rep. Lizzie Fletcher, would prohibit hostile state governments’ interference in out-of-state care and in interstate commerce involving legally approved medications.¹¹

The My Body, My Data Act of 2025 (H.R. 3916), introduced by Rep. Sara Jacobs, would provide digital privacy protections for consumers by prohibiting businesses from collecting or retaining personal reproductive and sexual health data beyond what is strictly necessary to provide requested services, and by giving individuals control over their information.¹²

Legislation carefully crafted to address practices like geofencing, and to protect a wider set of information that falls outside HIPAA, is an urgent need. The Reproductive Data Privacy and Protection Act (H.R. 3218), introduced by Rep. Ted Lieu, would limit law enforcement access to data related to reproductive care, including data from apps, period trackers, and geolocation.¹³ The Online Privacy Act of 2026 (H.R. 8014), introduced by Rep. Zoe Lofgren, would provide a robust framework for individuals’ control over their own information (including medical and related personal data), establish a new Digital Privacy Agency for enforcement, and ensure that civil actions can move forward unconstrained by mandatory arbitration and class-action waiver clauses.¹⁴

Crisis Pregnancy Centers: A Disinformation Industry

Crisis pregnancy centers operate at industrial scale, outnumbering real abortion clinics roughly three to one and drawing taxpayer funding in sixteen states.¹⁵ Posing as care providers, CPCs use deception and disinformation (falsely tying abortion to breast cancer, infertility, and mental illness¹⁶) to hinder access to evidence-based medicine. And because most are not bound by HIPAA despite implying that they are, the sensitive data CPCs collect carries none of the privacy protections clients are led to assume.¹⁷

The Stop Anti-Abortion Disinformation Act (H.R. 846), introduced in 2025 by Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, would prohibit deceptively advertising abortion and contraception services and give the FTC power to penalize violators.¹⁸

Contraception Is Next

Justice Thomas’s concurrence in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization explicitly invited the Court to reconsider Griswold v. Connecticut, writing that the Court “should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.”¹⁹ That invitation has not been ignored. In states where abortion is banned, clinic closures already mean a drop in contraceptive prescriptions,²⁰ and efforts to falsely brand IUDs and the morning-after pill as abortion are underway to end access entirely.²¹ Despite ninety-two percent of Americans approving of contraceptives,²² Senate Republicans continue to refuse to codify Griswold: this session’s Right to Contraception Act, introduced by Rep. Lizzie Fletcher as H.R. 999 on February 5, 2025, remains stalled in committee.²³ This is as clear a case for court reform as any.

Court Reform

The pattern is unmistakable: a Supreme Court remade by a handful of justices is dismantling rights that a large majority of Americans support, and inviting itself to go further. Restoring reproductive freedom for the long term means reforming the Court that took it away.

I support a court-reform agenda with three pillars. First, expanding the Supreme Court to rebalance a bench shaped by norm-breaking confirmations, through legislation to increase the Court from nine to thirteen justices.²⁴ Second, term limits, a regularized eighteen-year term with a new appointment every two years so that no single seat can distort the law for a generation, as proposed by the Supreme Court Tenure Establishment and Retirement Modernization (TERM) Act.²⁵ Third, a binding code of ethics: justices should be held to the same recusal and disclosure standards as every other federal judge, the goal of the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency (SCERT) Act.²⁶ A Court the public can trust is the precondition for every right discussed here.

Legal, Accessible, and Affordable for All

As of 2024, more than eighteen point four million women of reproductive age in America (roughly one quarter) lived in abortion care deserts, more than one hundred miles from the nearest facility.²⁷ Legalizing and funding care throughout the country, for all, is imperative.

Abortion bans build on more than thirteen hundred restrictions enacted since 1973, compounding systems that by design underserve low-income communities and communities of color, and causing already stark disparities in access and outcomes to intensify.²⁸ Nationwide, Black women die from pregnancy-related causes at roughly three and a half times the rate of white women.²⁹

The EACH Act of 2025 (H.R. 4611), introduced by Rep. Ayanna Pressley,³⁰ takes aim at the cost barrier that drives some of these disparities by repealing the Hyde Amendment and guaranteeing abortion coverage across federally funded health programs, while shielding private coverage from government interference.³¹

A 2021 cohort study of more than two hundred twenty-three thousand women found that disabled women of all races faced sharply higher rates of serious pregnancy complications (thromboembolism, cardiovascular events, infection, and preeclampsia) and put their adjusted risk of maternal death at roughly eleven times that of non-disabled women.³² The Reproductive Health Care Accessibility Act (H.R. 8829), recently reintroduced by Rep. Ayanna Pressley, targets disparities in care that affect disabled patients.³³

The Bottom Line

Someone who cannot choose whether to continue a pregnancy cannot freely choose a career, a partner, or when to build a family on their own terms. Someone whose private medical searches can land them in jail is not a free citizen.

Abortion is health care, and health care is a human right.

---

References