Republicans Want to Create a Government-Run, Anti-Abortion Website and Collect Pregnant Women’s Personal Information

The Standing with Moms Act “disingenuously claims to provide information about family planning resources, intentionally stigmatizes abortion and spreads harmful misinformation, promotes crisis pregnancy centers, and is endorsed by anti-abortion extremists,” said Martha Spieker, associate director for federal advocacy communications at the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.

Republicans have introduced a bill that would create a federal anti-abortion website that provides misleading information about abortion, directs women to health “centers” that pressure them not to have abortions, and could even collect their personal information to share with anti-abortion groups.

Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina—who’s viewed as one of the more moderate Republicans on the issue of abortion—and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida recently reintroduced the Standing with Moms Act, a bill that would create a “life.gov” website, which would contain information and resources related to pregnancy and adoption by ZIP code. 

Among the resources the website would provide are “pregnancy counseling,” “comprehensive information on alternatives to abortion,” “information about abortion risks” (which are exceedingly low) and misleading information about conception and child development. 

The bill would also ban the inclusion of any information or resources on the website from entities that perform, refer, or counsel on abortion care or provide financial support for it.

In effect, the website would likely wind up directing women to “crisis pregnancy centers,” which often advertise themselves as offering a full range of reproductive healthcare but do not offer abortion care and often exist solely to discourage patients from accessing abortion care.

The bill is supported by a who’s who of anti-abortion organizations, including many that celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade last summer. 

In contrast, organizations that support reproductive freedom, such as the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, oppose the bill. 

The Standing with Moms Act “disingenuously claims to provide information about family planning resources, intentionally stigmatizes abortion and spreads harmful misinformation, promotes crisis pregnancy centers, and is endorsed by anti-abortion extremists,” said Martha Spieker, associate director for federal advocacy communications at the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.

Writer Jessica Valenti also pointed out that the bill allows for the collection and possible sharing of pregnant women’s personal information with anti-abortion organizations. 

Here’s how that could happen:

In addition to launching life.gov, the bill requires HHS to create an online portal on the agency’s website that surveys visitors on specific questions, asks for their zip code, and provides them with “resources” in their area.

The agency would furthermore be required to develop a plan to follow up with users of the portal, if they’ve taken the survey and consented to having their contact information collected. Assuming they have, then the Secretary of Health and Human Services would be tasked with conducting “outreach via phone or email to follow up with users of the portal” to provide information about “additional resources.”

Additionally, if a pregnant woman visits the portal—perhaps not knowing its anti-abortion leanings—and requests additional information about pregnancy resources, HHS agents would be required to make “every effort” to provide specific information to the woman “in coordination with Federal, State, local governmental, and private health care providers and resources”—the latter of which is a roundabout way of describing crisis pregnancy centers.

“Members of Congress should swiftly reject [the bill],” Spieker said in a statement. “It is ridiculous and downright dangerous that in the midst of a worsening maternal mortality crisis and an abortion access crisis that people with the power to protect patients and pregnant people choose to cause harm for political gain.”