Ensuring Accurate and Complete Abortion Data Reporting Act of 2025
The Ensuring Accurate and Complete Abortion Data Reporting Act of 2025 would require states to submit standardized abortion data to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and create a new CDC data-collection framework. It ties a portion of federal Medicaid family planning payments to the States' compliance with reporting, creating a two-year lead time before the reporting requirements and data-collection system become fully active. The bill would establish a CDC abortion surveillance system with a mandatory set of data elements, bolster states’ reporting with technical assistance, and require annual public reporting of aggregated abortion data. The overarching goal is to produce more complete, comparable national abortion statistics to inform public health policy.
Key Points
- 1Mandatory abortion data reporting to CDC: The bill creates a CDC abortion surveillance system and a standardized worksheet. States must report a defined set of mandatory data elements (and may include optional ones) for abortions, enabling cross-tabulation analyses (e.g., by age, race, gestational age, method, and residence).
- 2Medicaid payments contingent on data submission: For states to receive federal payments for certain family planning services under Medicaid, they must submit the required abortion data for the year before the previous year by December 31 of the previous year, with a mechanism for late submission to still receive payments (including retroactive payments).
- 3Certification and penalties for data accuracy: States must certify that submitted abortion data are accurate; if a state knowingly provides false information, it loses eligibility for Medicaid family planning payments for the first full fiscal year after the determination.
- 4Specific data elements and reporting cadence: The act specifies variables (e.g., maternal age, gestational age, race and ethnicity, abortion method, marital status, prior pregnancies, residence, and whether the child survived) and calls for annual reporting with publication by December 30 of the third calendar year after the covered year.
- 5Scope and timeline: The new reporting framework applies to states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories, with a lead time of two years after enactment before implementation begins.