IPM: What’s a little government intrusion among friends? 

TO: Interested Parties

FROM: Planned Parenthood Action Fund

MEMO: What’s a little government intrusion among friends? 

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What’s a little government intrusion among friends? 

That seems to be the question some abortion opponents are asking these days. Anti-abortion groups and their allies are looking for new ways to intrude on people’s lives and freedoms.

Recent news reports detail officials using state resources to harass abortion rights supporters –  intimidating ballot initiative petition signers and filing new, baseless lawsuits to get access to private health information. The lawsuits to get access to health information echo the proposed policies in the infamous Project 2025 agenda, which includes recommendations to block access to reproductive health care — even to monitor people’s pregnancies and collect intrusive information about when, how, and why they have abortions. 

Here’s what we’re reading on the latest efforts to put government where it shouldn’t be: unnerving petition signers and prying into our private medical decisions. 

Florida voters who signed petitions to put Amendment 4, a measure to protect abortion from government interference, on the ballot are getting unnerving house calls from state election police. The Tampa Bay Times reports that the officers have a startling amount of information about these abortion-rights voters: 

Isaac Menasche remembers being at the Cape Coral farmer’s market last year when someone asked him if he’d sign a petition to get Florida’s abortion amendment on the ballot.

He said yes — and he told a law enforcement officer as much when one showed up at the door of his Lee County home earlier this week.

Menasche said he was surprised when the plainclothes officer twice asked if it was really Menasche who had signed the petition. The officer said he was looking into potential petition fraud.

“I’m not a person who is going out there protesting for abortion,” Menasche said. “I just felt strongly and I took the opportunity when the person asked me, to say yeah, I’ll sign that petition.”

Menasche later posted on Facebook that it was “obvious to me that a significant effort was exerted to determine if indeed I had signed the petition.” He told the Times that the officer who showed up at his door had a copy of Menasche’s driver’s license and other documents related to him. Menasche said he does not recall which agency the officer was with.

One county supervisor told the Associated Press that the state’s aggressive inquiry is unprecedented. The signatures in question have already been validated and verified by state election officials, and the deadline to challenge has already passed. But state officials are continuing to use their power to intimidate voters.

And that’s not all: Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) is being sued for misusing state funds to distribute disinformation about Amendment 4. The Florida Supreme Court has already agreed to fast-track a lawsuit challenging the use of state resources for these purposes. As reported by the Miami Herald, the plaintiff suing Governor DeSantis and several other Florida state officials alleges that the state webpage — official AHCA header and all — tells readers that the amendment “threatens women’s safety” and may even violate a Florida law that prohibits state employees and officers from using their “official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with an election.” 

Officials have called the site a “public service announcement,” but the use of state resources to campaign against an abortion amendment echoes similar (unsuccessful) efforts in Ohio last year to override the will of the people. 

In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing to gain access to private medical records of people who seek abortion out-of-state. The lawsuit challenges federal privacy regulations, including a regulation issued this year to protect reproductive health information. The New York Times reports: 

In a statement on Wednesday, Texas’ attorney general, Ken Paxton, called the April rule “a backdoor attempt at weakening Texas’ laws.” He added: “The Biden administration’s motive is clear: to subvert lawful state investigations on issues that the courts have said the states may investigate.”... 

… “Texas is arguing that the federal health agency doesn’t have the authority to determine what the scope of federal privacy is,” said David Donatti, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, which has been active in fighting the state’s restrictions on abortion.

“That’s remarkable both as a frontal assault on the ability of H.H.S. to define medical privacy,” he said, referring to the Health and Human Services Department. “But it also demonstrates the lengths that Texas is willing to go to to eliminate abortion and reproductive health access — not just in Texas, but across the country.”

Paxton’s lawsuit is not only a chilling reminder of how far some people will go to stop us from controlling our own bodies — it’s a mirror of some of the most dangerous ideas in Project 2025. 

A 922-page blueprint for radically reshaping government’s role in our lives, Project 2025 provides a roadmap for government intrusion — probing our personal business,  including the monitoring of pregnancies. 

As this Glamour piece notes, “[o]ne particularly frightening policy suggestion in the Project 2025 book is to substantially increase nationwide abortion surveillance…Project 2025’s plan would make abortion data reporting mandatory, and in far greater detail, explicitly to address ‘abortion tourism.’” 

Beyond monitoring people’s pregnancies, here are other policies Project 2025 proposes:

• Eliminate abortion nationwide by misapplying a law from the 1800s without any accountability from Congress. 
• Ban medication abortion nationwide by revoking FDA approval of mifepristone. 
• Allow employers to deny workers’ access to birth control. 
• “Defund” abortion providers like Planned Parenthood, leaving millions of people without access to their health care providers.

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Planned Parenthood Action Fund is an independent, nonpartisan, not-for-profit membership organization formed as the advocacy and political arm of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The Action Fund engages in educational, advocacy, and limited electoral activity, including grassroots organizing, legislative advocacy, and voter education