Indiana passed the first and one of the strongest abortion bans in the country after the Supreme Court reversal of Roe v. Wade, only to be thwarted by the state’s bureaucrats.
The new law, with exceptions for rape, incest, lethal fetal anomaly, and serious threat to the mother’s health, blocked hundreds of abortions. Once the law went into effect, the number of abortions in the last quarter of 2023 drastically dropped to just 46 in the entire state, compared to 1,724 abortions in the same time period a year before.
At the same time abortion numbers began to drop in Indiana, the state’s department of health, which tracks each abortion that takes place in Indiana, stopped issuing what are called terminated pregnancy reports. The reports, which dated back to the 1970s, provided watchdog groups with a window into the abortion industry, allowing them to do oversight and submit complaints regarding doctors not following the law.
With dramatically fewer abortions taking place with the new ban, the Indiana Department of Health argued patients would be more easily identifiable. With the backing of the state’s public access counselor, the department ceased making the individual reports available, claiming that they were now medical records and no longer subject to the state’s public access law. Indiana’s Republican-controlled legislature and Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb increased the health department’s funding in the last legislative session from $7 million to $150 million per year.
Now just weeks after Indiana’s Attorney General Todd Rokita challenged the health department’s decision to
