NY Senate Panel Clears Reproductive Health Data Privacy Bill

Responding to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, S-1633 would add protections for sensitive health data and give patients a right to restrict disclosure of certain information.

“Electronic health records improve the quality of health care by ensuring that every provider who sees a patient has access to their medical history,” the bill says. “But the information in a patient's electronic health record may be shared across state lines automatically and by default. In a post-Dobbs world, as other states move to criminalize abortion care and gender-affirming care, this automatic sharing can put New York patients who travel or move to banned states, as well as the New York providers who care for them, at risk of criminalization.”

At the hearing, Sen. Jack Martins (R) objected to allowing people to selectively remove things from their record because he said it undermines the point of electronic health records, which is to make it easier to share info among health providers. The bill is based on a "misplaced" fear that someone in another state could criminalize someone from New York, he said.

Ranking Republican Patrick Gallivan agreed. The bill could lead to a situation where a provider lacks information necessary to treat a patient, he said.

However, Chair Gustavo Rivera (D) said it’s "important and imperative to protect that information, because the likelihood that it might be utilized as a way to criminalize an individual is not a hypothetical.” He noted that the bill would protect someone from another state who traveled to New York for a procedure and then traveled back to their home state where it's criminalized.

"This is not living in fantasy land,” said Rivera. “This is living in reality."