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Maine lawmakers on the health committee are considering a bill that would eliminate a new requirement for health care professionals to report miscarriages before 20 weeks to the state Department of Health and Human Services.
During a public hearing Monday, lawmakers heard testimony that the requirement is invasive for patients, burdensome for providers and unhelpful for data analysis.
The measure comes at a time when national advocacy groups are calling for scaling back abortion and miscarriage reporting requirements due to fears that the information could be used in investigations in states with strict abortion restrictions.
In 2023, Maine changed the data providers are required to collect on abortion, scaling back reporting on certain demographic data, including race, marital status, information on children or previous abortions.
Aluel Athian, a college student in Maine, testified that the current practice of tracking abortions and miscarriages represents “an oppressive and invasive level of surveillance over women’s reproductive health.”
“This kind of data collection creates a dangerous pathway for the criminalization of pregnancy outcomes, as we’ve seen in Texas,” Athian added.
Texas has banned nearly all abortions and instituted strict laws that can include up to life in prison for performing a prohibited abortion. Reporting around the country has also shown that people have been reluctant to seek care for a miscarriage because it may be conflated with a self-managed abortion, risking prosecution.
The measure to stop reporting some miscarriages in Maine, however, is primarily tied to bureaucratic procedure. Sarah Calder, senior government affairs director for MaineHealth, said the bill is in response to an updated miscarriage reporting form distributed to hospitals last year by the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Given that miscarriages before 20 weeks often do not require medical intervention, our providers were alarmed by this reporting requirement and feared that their ability to practice medicine could be impacted by not meeting these reporting requirements,” Calder said in her testimony. The loss of a pregnancy after 20 weeks is considered a stillbirth; healthcare providers are required to register such deaths and obtain a death certificate.
MaineHealth and Northern Light Health both testified that there are multiple reasons why collecting this data would be difficult: miscarriages often occur outside a healthcare setting and can happen over multiple days, they can’t always be confirmed if the mother didn’t know she was pregnant and they often occur without a healthcare provider and are reported long after they occurred, if at all.
As a result, “The data that is currently being reported to the department is underreported and inaccurate,” Calder said.
Anne Sedlack, director of advocacy at the Maine Medical Association, said the benefits of collecting this data are “outweighed by the fact that the results from the data collected will be inaccurate.” If there is a medical intervention, this information will be collected through other means, she added.
“Finally, miscarriages are often profoundly traumatizing for the parents and need to be handled delicately,” she added.
The Maine section of the American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists also testified in support of the measure. There was no testimony in opposition during the public hearing and the measure was found to have no fiscal impact.
Members of the Health and Human Services committee will next decide whether the bill ought to pass.
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