Ensuring Accurate and Complete Abortion Data Reporting Act of 2025
This bill, the Ensuring Accurate and Complete Abortion Data Reporting Act of 2025, would make abortion data reporting to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) mandatory for purposes tied to Medicaid family planning payments, and it would create a formal CDC data system for abortion statistics. It would require states to submit standardized, de-identified (aggregate) abortion data to the CDC’s abortion surveillance system, with a set of mandatory data elements and the possibility of voluntary additional questions. The bill links federal Medicaid payments for certain family planning services to timely, certified reporting of abortion data, imposes penalties for knowingly false reporting, and directs the CDC to publish an annual national abortion report. In short, it aims to standardize and compel abortion data collection across states to improve public health understanding and policy analysis.
Key Points
- 1Medicaid payments for family planning services become contingent on annual abortion data submissions to the CDC, beginning after a two-year post-enactment period. States must report yearly abortion data (for the year before the previous year) by December 31 of the previous year to receive payments, with a mechanism for late submissions to preserve funding (including retroactive payments) if submitted by December 31 of the current year. States that knowingly provide false information may lose Medicaid payments for the first full fiscal year following the determination.
- 2The bill creates a new CDC data system (317W) under the Public Health Service Act to collect aggregate abortion data in a standardized format. It requires a standard worksheet with mandatory data elements (see below) and allows optional (voluntary) questions. The system would support cross-tabulation of multiple variables (e.g., age by gestational age; race by gestational age; etc.) and would be periodically updated to reflect changing needs.
- 3Data elements (variables) to be collected in the CDC worksheet (mandatory for purposes of the Medicaid reporting requirement) include: maternal age, gestational age, maternal race, maternal ethnicity, maternal race by ethnicity, abortion method type, maternal marital status, previous pregnancies (live births, previous induced abortions, previous spontaneous abortions), maternal residence (county and state), and whether the child survived the abortion.
- 4States would receive technical assistance from the Secretary (through the CDC) to facilitate reporting, and the Secretary would issue an annual national abortion report that includes the data collected, with publication by December 30 of the third calendar year after the covered year.
- 5The reporting framework would classify questions as mandatory or voluntary, with the mandatory data tied to the Medicaid payment provisions. The framework also contemplates updates to the worksheet and its data fields over time.