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

14. Department of Health and Human Services · Notable

Require CDC reporting of abortion complications and born-alive infants

Not started

455 14. Department of Health and Human Services

“In addition, CDC should require monitoring and reporting for complications due to abortion and every instance of children being born alive after an abortion.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    CDC has imposed no requirement to monitor or report abortion complications or born-alive infants. The only two in-window Federal Register documents containing "born alive" are the State Department's Protecting Life in Foreign Assistance rule and an unrelated Fish and Wildlife Service finding. The Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act (S. 6, H.R. 21) failed cloture in the Senate on 2025-01-22 and imposes reporting on physicians rather than on CDC in any case. The read of CDC's own pages on 2026-09-03 makes the negative sharper than "no requirement was imposed": **both objects of this ask are definitionally outside the surveillance system.** CDC defines a legal induced abortion as an intervention "intended to terminate a suspected or known intrauterine pregnancy and **that does not result in a live birth**", so born-alive cases are excluded by the definition; and the fields states report are counts, gestational age, method, age and residence, with **no complications field**. The pages carry the date 2024-11-27 and have not been revised in the window, so they are read-but-undatable sources under §5 rather than Evidence.

    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 once thought closed to us; it is not, 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 gate. They were read but carry no date inside 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
other
Object
CDC abortion complication and born-alive reporting
ID
1221