Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

14. Department of Health and Human Services · Minor

Fund CDC studies into the risks and complications of abortion

Not started

455 14. Department of Health and Human Services

“It should fund studies into the risks and complications of abortion and ensure that it corrects and does not promote misinformation regarding the comparative health and psychological benefits of childbirth versus the health and psychological risks of intentionally taking a human life through abortion.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    No CDC funding announcement, Federal Register notice or grant program in the window funds studies of the risks and complications of abortion. Full-text Federal Register search for "abortion complication" returns 0 documents in the window and the NIH Guide's 15 hits for "abortion" are all pre-2025. CDC's own record was read on 2026-09-03 and it is negative in a stronger way than a keyword search: CDC's Abortion Surveillance system **collects no complications data at all**. Its own description of the system enumerates the fields states report — counts, gestational age, method, age and residence — and complications is not among them; "most states and jurisdictions that collect abortion data report whether an abortion was performed by medication or surgery" is the extent of it. Both surveillance pages carry the date 2024-11-27 and have not been revised inside the window, and CDC's site index shows no in-window page about abortion risks or complications.

    No action found yet. This entry is the starting point, not a finding.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • The four p. 455 CDC asks (#1217, #1219, #1220, #1221) share one negative search. cdc.gov was earlier recorded as refusing to open; it can be read, and the pages were read on 2026-09-03. None of them can be Evidence: the two Abortion Surveillance pages carry the date 2024-11-27 and the one fertility-awareness page 2024-11-19, all before the evidence window, so they fail the date test. They were read but cannot date anything in the window, and the fact that they have not been revised since before 2025-01-20 is itself the shape of the negative — nothing was added to CDC’s abortion surveillance in the window, and nothing was removed either.
Action
create
Object
CDC studies of abortion risks and complications
ID
1217