Addressing The HIPAA Blind Spot For Crisis Pregnancy Centers

By Carmel Shachar and Eli Y. Adashi. Originally published in Health Affairs Forefront on November 15, 2024.

Crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) often bill themselves as legitimate reproductive health care or medical clinics, but they are actually nonmedical centers, operated by anti-abortion advocates, that seek to convince pregnant people to choose parenting or adoption over abortion. To attract clients, CPCs—which are often religiously affiliated—may offer services including pregnancy testing and ultrasounds as well as social supports such as diapers. As of 2019, there were approximately 2,600 CPCs in contrast to 780 abortion clinics. While the demographics of their patients is unclear, scholars have estimated that in post-Roe America, 57 percent of the population lives closer to a CPC than an abortion clinic, with 99 percent of the population in 13 states living closer to a CPC than an abortion clinic. Since 2003, CPCs have increasingly focused on reaching Black women.

As part of their deception, CPCs will sometimes invoke the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to collect personal information from clients—asking clients to sign authorization forms, posting notice of privacy practices in their facilities, or describing themselves as HIPAA-compliant on their websites. CPCs are able to do this because HIPAA, which governs the privacy and security of electronic health records, has a regulatory blind spot when it comes to policing organizations that claim HIPAA compliance when they are not required to do so.

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