CDC nominee pledges broader abortion data collection amid heated political debate

In her Senate hearing, Dr. Erica Schwartz agreed to pursue fuller abortion reporting from all states, echoing a long-standing CDC function that dates back to 1969. Senator Josh Hawley pressed her on gathering data even from jurisdictions that treat abortions as "emergency services" and thus hide them from current statistics. Abortion-rights advocates, represented by Reproductive Freedom for All, denounced the pledge as a strategy to monitor and eventually criminalize abortions, while pro-life voices such as the Charlotte Lozier Institute argued that anonymized data are essential for health policy and maternal-mortality research.

The controversy is amplified by the 2022 Dobbs decision, which left abortion regulation to the states and revived talk of enforcing the 1873 Comstock Act against mail-order abortion medication. Although the CDC has not published recent abortion numbers, the Guttmacher Institute estimates over 1.1 million procedures annually, noting a rise in self-managed abortions. Schwartz assumed her CDC leadership role last week, but the agency remains silent on how the expanded data will be used.