The Indiana Supreme Court just settled it: an abortion is not a public record

The Indiana Supreme Court voted to keep terminated pregnancy reports private and confidential after a year of courtroom battles.

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The fight for access to, and on the other side protection of, abortion records has been playing out in Indiana courtrooms for more than a year, but last week it ended quietly- on a single page, with no explanation at all.

On June 29, all five justices on the Indiana Supreme Court voted to let stand a Court of Appeals ruling that terminated pregnancy reports, or TPRs, are confidential patient medical records. No dissent. No opinion. Just a one-line order declining to take up the state's appeal. That's how the Indiana Supreme Court often handles these denials, and it means the real legal reasoning- the actual "why"- lives in the Court of Appeals decision from back in December, not in anything the Supreme Court wrote itself.

What's in these records

Every time a doctor performs an abortion in Indiana, state law requires them to file a report with the Department of Health. Since the state's near-total abortion ban took effect in August 2023, those reports got more detailed- not just aggregate numbers, but a patient's age, race and ethnicity, county and state of residence, education and marital status, the date and location of the abortion, gestational age, and the medical reasoning behind why the abortion was performed. Doctors and hospitals also documented that Indiana's abortion counts fell 99% between 2022 and 2025, from 9,529 procedures down to 126- which means in a lot of counties, a TPR isn't really anonymous. It's identifiable, especially once someone pairs it with a public record request.

That's exactly what an anti-abortion group called Voices for Life, based in South Bend, had been doing since 2022- requesting individual reports and using them to file complaints against doctors, more than 700 by one count.

How we got here

The Department of Health stopped releasing individual TPRs in December 2023, worried the records could be "reverse engineered" to identify patients. Voices for Life sued to force disclosure. A Marion County judge dismissed that suit in September 2024, ruling TPRs were exempt as medical records- the third time a trial court reached that conclusion. Voices for Life appealed, but while that was pending, something changed: after Gov. Mike Braun took office in January 2025, the Attorney General's office- representing the Health Department on appeal- negotiated a settlement agreeing to hand over the reports with some redactions.

That settlement is what pulled Dr. Caitlin Bernard and Dr. Caroline Rouse, two Indianapolis OB-GYNs, into the case directly. They sued in February 2025 to block release, arguing the redactions wouldn't actually protect anyone. A Marion County judge granted them a temporary restraining order, then a preliminary injunction in March 2025, and the state appealed that.

Bernard's own history sits right at the center of the legal reasoning here. She's the doctor who, in 2022, publicly disclosed she'd provided an abortion for a 10-year-old rape victim- and she was formally reprimanded by Indiana's Medical Licensing Board for it in 2023. The information in that disclosure- age, state of residence, gestational age, approximate treatment date- is functionally the same category of information a TPR contains. The Court of Appeals leaned on that directly: the state disciplined a doctor for sharing exactly the kind of details it was simultaneously trying to make public through TPRs. The panel called that a genuine, concrete injury, not a hypothetical one.

What the Court of Appeals decided

In a 35-page, unanimous opinion issued December 5, 2025,, a three-judge panel affirmed the injunction on every front the state contested:

• TPRs count as "patient medical records" under Indiana's public records law even without a patient's name attached. The court's own comparison: a driving record doesn't stop being a driving record just because the driver's name is missing.
• The injunction properly applies statewide- not just to Bernard and Rouse's own patients- because limiting it narrower would let identical records from other physicians leak out while the underlying case continues.
• The Department of Health still keeps full access to TPRs for its own enforcement purposes, and the quarterly aggregate reports the law also requires remain public. Nothing about this ruling blocks oversight- it blocks public release of identifiable individual reports.

Why the Supreme Court's silence matters

The state's attorney general's office pushed for the Indiana Supreme Court to take the case up, arguing the appeals court's reasoning distorted standing requirements and amounted to letting private parties block government transparency without a real, personal injury. The Supreme Court didn't bite- and, as is typical practice for these transfer denials, gave no reasoning of its own. All five justices were appointed by Republican governors, which is worth noting given how directly this cuts against the position of Attorney General Todd Rokita, who has pushed since 2024 for TPRs to be treated as public records.

That silence is functionally the end of the case. The injunction stands, statewide, indefinitely- unless the Republican-controlled legislature decides to rewrite the statute. A bill that would have made TPRs unambiguously public, Senate Bill 240, didn't get taken up this session.

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