The second privacy concern is the potential use of health-care facility records to incriminate an institution or its clinicians for providing abortion services. Relevant records could include electronic health records, employee emails or paging information and mandatory reports to state agencies. Clinicians may not realize that if they are using an institutional email address or server, their institution likely has direct access to information and communications stored there, which can be used to search for violations. State Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) laws also allow citizens to request public records from employees of government hospitals and clinics.

“Additionally, state mandatory reporting laws for child abuse might be interpreted to cover abortions — particularly if life is defined as beginning at fertilization,” the authors note.

The third scenario is that information generated from a woman’s online activity could be used to show she sought an abortion or helped someone to do so. Many women use websites and apps that are not HIPAA-regulated or protected by patient-physician privilege, such as period-tracking apps used by millions of women that collect information on the timing of menstruation and sexual activity.

“There are many instances of internet service providers sharing user data with law enforcement, and prosecutors obtaining and using cellphone data in criminal prosecutions,” write Mello and Spector-Bagdady, adding commercially collected data are also frequently sold to or shared with third parties.

“Thus, pregnant persons may unwittingly create incriminating documentation that has scant legal protection and is useful for enforcing abortion restrictions,” they said.

The immediate problem, Mello notes, is in the states that have already banned abortion or passed restrictive laws.

“There could be a problem with states trying to reach outside their borders to prosecute people, but that could well be unconstitutional,” Mello said.

Some states’ laws sweep abortion pills into the definition of illegal abortions, she said, and there are legal obstacles to supplying the pills across state lines.

“There is a lot of energy going into figuring out a workaround right now, but it’s too soon to call,” Mello said.

Recommended Protections

So how can clinicians and health-care facilities protect their patients and themselves?

When counseling patients of childbearing age about reproductive health issues, clinicians should caution their patients about putting too much medical data online and refer them to expert organizations that will help them minimize their digital footprint.

When documenting reproductive health encounters, the authors said, clinicians should ask themselves: “What information needs to be in the medical record to assure safe, good-quality care, buttress our claim for reimbursement, or comply with clear legal directives?” For example, does information about why a patient may have experienced a miscarriage need to be recorded?

Patients and clinicians should be aware that email and texting may be seen by others, so conversations among staff about reproductive health issues may best be conducted by phone or in person.

Finally, if abortion-related patient information is sought by state law enforcement officials, a facility’s attorney should be consulted about asserting physician-patient privilege and determining whether the disclosure is mandated by law.

A new study by Stanford economists shows that giving fathers flexibility to take time off work in the months after their children are born improves the postpartum health and mental well-being of mothers.

In the study, slated for release by the National Bureau of Economic Research on June 3, Petra Persson and Maya Rossin-Slater examined the effects of a reform in Sweden that introduced more flexibility into the parental leave system. The 2012 law removed a prior restriction preventing a child’s mother and father from taking paid leave at the same time. And it allowed fathers to use up to 30 days of paid leave on an intermittent basis within a year of their child’s birth while the mothers were still on leave.

The policy change resulted in some clear benefits toward the mother’s health, including reductions in childbirth-related complications and postpartum anxiety, according to their empirical analysis.

“A lot of the discussion around how to support mothers is about mothers being able to take leave, but we often don’t think about the other part of the equation — fathers,” says Rossin-Slater, an assistant professor of health research and policy.

“Our study underscores that the father’s presence in the household shortly after childbirth can have important consequences for the new mother's physical and mental health,” says Persson, an assistant professor of economics.

Rossin-Slater and Persson are both faculty fellows at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

Among their main findings of effects following the reform: Mothers are 14 percent less likely to need a specialist or be admitted to a hospital for childbirth-related complications — such as mastitis or other infections — within the first six months of childbirth. And they are 11 percent less likely to get an antibiotic prescription within that first half-year of their baby’s life.

There is also an overall 26 percent drop in the likelihood of any anti-anxiety prescriptions during that six-month postpartum period — with reductions in prescriptions being most pronounced during the first three months after childbirth.

What’s more, the study found that the average new father used paid leave for only a few days following the reform — far less than the maximum 30 days allowed — indicating how strong of a difference a couple of days of extra support for the mother could make.

“The key here is that families are granted the flexibility to decide, on a day-to-day basis, exactly when to have the dad stay home,” said Persson. “If, for example, the mom gets early symptoms of mastitis while breastfeeding, the dad can take one or two days off from work so that the mom can rest, which may avoid complications from the infection or the need for antibiotics.”

These indirect benefits from giving fathers workplace flexibility are not trivial matters when you consider the health issues mothers often face after childbirth and after they get home from the hospital, says Rossin-Slater, who is also a faculty member of Stanford Health Policy.

Infections and childbirth complications lead to one out of 100 women getting readmitted to the hospital within 30 days in the United States, according to the study.

Meanwhile, postpartum depression occurs for about one out of nine women, and maternal mortality has also been a rising trend over the past 25 years in the U.S.

The study comes as a growing number of lawmakers in the United States vocalize support for paid family leave but have failed to pass federal legislation.

Washington, D.C., and six states have adopted various paid family leave laws, but the U.S. remains the only industrialized nation in the world that does not have a national mandate guaranteeing a certain amount of paid parental leave.

Some federal lawmakers are working on family leave measures and have proposed such legislation over the past few years — including The Family Act, The New Parents Act — but none of them have ever gained enough traction to proceed in Congress.

This new study can help broaden the policy discussions, the researchers say.

The larger context around paid family leave policies is often framed today as a way to help narrow the gender wage gap by giving women more workplace flexibility and fewer career setbacks.

This study, however, shines a light on maternal health costs and how a policy on paid family leave — that includes workplace flexibility for the father — offers more benefits than previously thought, Rossin-Slater says.

“It's important to think not only about giving families access to some leave, but also about letting them have agency over how they use it,” she says.

And when it comes to concerns that fathers might use paid parental leave to goof off instead of spending the time as intended, the researchers say their study should assuage those worries.

“It's not like fathers are going to end up using a whole month to just stay home and watch TV. We don't find any evidence of that,” Rossin-Slater says. “Instead they only use a limited number of days precisely when the timing for that seems most beneficial for the family.”

“For all these reasons,” Persson says, “giving households flexibility in how to use paternity leave makes a lot of sense.”

An estimated 210,000 girls may have “gone missing” due to China’s “Later, Longer, Fewer” campaign, a birth planning policy predating the One Child Policy, according to a new study led by Stanford Health Policy researchers published by the Center for Global Development.

The study looked at hundreds of thousands of births occurring before and during the “Later, Longer, Fewer” policy to measure its effect on marriage, fertility, and sex selection behavior. The policy, which began in the 1970s and preceded China's One-Child Policy, promoted later marriage, longer gaps between successive children, and having fewer children to cut the country's population. The study emphasizes that because this policy existed before ultrasound technology was widely available — and therefore before selective abortion was an option — these missing girls must have been due to postnatal neglect of infant girls, or in the extreme, infanticide.

The authors of the new study are Grant Miller, director of the Stanford Center on Global Poverty and Development, a core faculty member at Stanford Health Policy and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; Kimberly Babiarz, a research scholar at Stanford Health Policy; Paul Ma and Shige Song.

The researchers found that China’s “Longer, Later, Fewer” population control policy reduced total fertility rates by 0.9 births per woman and was directly responsible for an estimated 210,000 missing girls countrywide. The phenomenon of “missing girls” widely recognized in later years under the One Child Policy is largely thought due to sex-selective abortion after ultrasound technology spread across China.

“Prior research has shown that sex ratios rose dramatically under China's One-Child Policy, leading to stark imbalances in the numbers of men and women. But we’re finding that girls went missing earlier than previously thought, which can in part be directly attributed to birth planning policy that predates the One-Child Policy,” said Grant Miller, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development.

The top findings of the study include:

• The birth planning policy reduced fertility by 0.9 births per woman, explaining 28 percent of the overall decline during this period.

• The Later, Longer, Fewer policy is responsible for a roughly twofold increase in the use of “fertility stopping rules,” the practice of continuing to have children until the desired number of sons is achieved.

• The Later, Longer, Fewer policy is also responsible for an increase in postnatal neglect, from none to 0.3 percent of all female births in China during this period.

• Sex selection behavior was concentrated among couples with the highest demand for sons (couples that have more children but no sons), with sex ratios reaching 117 males per 100 female births among these couples.

“Population control strategies can have unforeseen consequences and human costs,” Miller said. “At the same time, as China debates the future of birth planning policies, it’s also important to note that family planning policy does not appear to be the largest driver of fertility.”