WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — Former Deputy Surgeon General Dr. Erica Schwartz, President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) testified this week that it is “absolutely critical” for the CDC to gather reliable abortion data upon which policymakers and health analysts can make decisions.
Nominated in April, Schwartz is currently appearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee for her confirmation hearings, where Live Action reports that she declared her “first priority will be restoring trust in public health institutions through radical transparency and unwavering scientific integrity.”
During his turn to ask questions, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) raised the matter of abortion data collection and analysis, which the CDC paused in November without explanation, and asked if she would “commit to trying to get as much information – again, to collect the data on the number and circumstances of abortions – as is provided for in this system.”
“Senator, you have my commitment,” Schwartz answered. “Abortion surveillance is an absolutely critical component of what the CDC is currently doing. To your point, it may be moved to another agency in HHS.”
“But I also want to also make sure that certain states are not conflating emergency services and hiding abortions in that ’emergency services’ case definition,” she added. “We need to make sure we’re pulling out true abortions and making sure that we’re really having clear case definitions regarding abortions, so the data is actually accurate.”
According to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, 44 states plus the District of Columbia have “some form” of abortion reporting requirements, but there is no uniform nationwide standard. The CDC has acknowledged that it only collects abortion data voluntarily submitted by states, whose reporting rules vary significantly. California, Maryland, and New Hampshire – three states that are significantly pro-abortion – have historically submitted no data whatsoever, further limiting the public’s understanding of the frequency of things such as late-term abortion and abortion complications.
Reliable, comprehensive data on abortion is more important than ever now that states can directly set their own abortion laws, so policymakers can study and compare the results of the various combinations of state policies (total bans, partial restrictions, public funding, etc.) and how efforts to ban abortion are undermined by tactics such as deregulated interstate distribution of abortion pills, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, constructing new abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, and making liberal states havens for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors.
In March, the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute’s Monthly Abortion Provision Study reported 1,125,930 abortions committed by clinicians in the U.S. in 2025, compared to 1,123,600 the year before (which in turn was an increase from 1,059,610 in 2023). Its report on the data describes abortion as “stable” and “largely unchanged” from 2024 to 2025, and the highest number since 2009 (albeit “well below the historical peak of slightly over 1.6 million abortions in 1990”).