Attorney General Lynn Fitch and 18 other state attorneys general have filed comments in opposition to a proposed expansion of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA. HIPAA protects the privacy of people’s health care records, and the rule change proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services would expand it to include records related to abortions sought in states where the procedure remains legal.
Mary Ziegler, a professor of law at the University of California Davis, says that even if the HIPAA change goes into effect as written, these medical records could still be obtained through a court order.
“HIPAA envisages scenarios where even though you have private medical records, those records become part of civil or criminal areas and kind of licensing investigations,” Ziegler said.
Under Mississippi law, a pregnant person would not be prosecuted for having an abortion, but the health care provider who performed the procedure would be. Ziegler says there are questions about whether states with strict abortion bans who want access to other states' records will try to apply their laws outside of their own borders.
“Why do you need those?” Ziegler said. “What is the scenario where you're going to be prosecuting only people in Mississippi for events that happened in Mississippi when you would need out of state medical records?”
Abortion has been illegal in Mississippi with few exceptions since July of last year.
