“Trump Campaign Shocks with Support for State Menstrual Tracking Programs—Is Big Brother Watching?”

One of the most toxic and politically explosive parts of the current abortion rights debate is tied to the complexities and perhaps inanities of leaving national abortion policy up to individual states. And a comment yesterday from Trump spokesman Jason Miller put the question right back into the center of the campaign.

It’s not enough for many anti-abortion stalwarts to ban the procedure in their state. They want to ban legal drugs designed to induce abortion. They want to surveil and block women traveling to other states to obtain an abortion. One of the most threatening dimensions of these programs is that they threaten to make doctors and other medical professionals — who might give counsel on or simply know about a woman’s plans to obtain an abortion — responsible for reporting her actions. If you visit your OB-GYN and discuss traveling to another state to get an abortion, does your OB have to report you to the local sheriff? It applies to third parties who might assist a woman either in traveling to get an abortion or getting FDA-approved medications to induce an abortion at home. The cases we’ve already seen range the gamut from sheriff’s departments wanting to pull medical and travel records for evidence of pregnancies that ended for unexplained reasons, gaps in menstruation, and trips out of state that coincided with a pregnancy not brought to term.

JD Vance is a major menstrual surveillance hawk. When the Biden administration pushed for updated HIPAA regulations to prevent sheriff’s departments and other law enforcement agencies from pulling women’s medical records for their menstrual surveillance programs (which they termed “compassionate laws protecting unborn children and their mothers”), Vance was one of only 28 members of Congress (and only 8 senators) to sign a letter protesting the new regs, which, per the letter, “interfere with valid state laws protecting life.” (You can see the letter here. It’s a doozy.)

Think about those numbers. Out of all the crazies in the House Republican caucus and among the 49 Republican senators, they couldn’t even get 30 people to sign this thing. But the Trump campaign itself, not surprisingly, has done its best to avoid the issue. I mean, how could they not? Even the name is toxic.

But yesterday in an interview on Newsmax of all places, a host asked Trump spokesman Jason Miller whether Donald Trump supported or wouldn’t aim to prevent states from enforcing their own menstrual surveillance regimes. It was one of those Fox-like interviews in which the host seems to go out of his way to signal what the right answer is. You wouldn’t do this, right?

“But he wouldn’t support monitoring pregnancies, even if a state decided to do that?” the host asked.

Miller responded that “he’s [i.e., Trump’s] made it very clear that he’s not going to go and weigh in and push various states on how they want to go and set up their particular rules and restrictions. That’s going to be up to the states.”

So he went there. It’s totally up to the states. Trump’s “leave it up to the states” approach applies to all these menstrual surveillance and travel restriction regimes as well. It’s a new opening for the Harris campaign to focus attention on an issue that hasn’t yet gotten enough attention — not just abortion rights as a general issue but states and county sheriffs’ effort to restrict women’s travel, access their medical records and current state of menstruation or gestation, and bar access to legal medications.

So menstrual surveillance programs in states with Trump abortion bans are back at the center of the campaign conversation. And it also comes at a propitious time because we’re only days away from the first and apparently only vice presidential debate, which will focus new attention on JD Vance. These programs are way weird. So it’s a nice opening for Tim Walz.