The Indiana Supreme Court on Monday declined to take up the fight over the state’s terminated pregnancy reports, leaving in place a lower court ruling that the documents are confidential patient medical records that cannot be released to the public.
The Court denied transfer petitions from the Indiana State Health Commissioner and the anti-abortion group Voices for Life, Inc. in a one-line order. All five justices concurred. No one wrote separately.
The denial leaves standing a unanimous December opinion from the Indiana Court of Appeals, which affirmed a preliminary injunction issued by Marion Superior Judge James Joven barring the Indiana Department of Health from releasing the reports, known as TPRs. Physicians must file a TPR with the state for every abortion performed in Indiana. The reports contain roughly 31 data points about each patient, including age, county and state of residence, race, marital status, and details of the patient’s medical history and procedure.
Indianapolis OB-GYNs Dr. Caitlin Bernard and Dr. Caroline Rouse sued in February 2025 to block the reports’ release after the Health Department, under the incoming Braun administration, reversed its prior position and entered a settlement agreement with South Bend-based Voices for Life promising to turn the records over in response to public records requests. Joven enjoined the release in March 2025, and the state and Voices for Life appealed.
Writing for the Court of Appeals panel, Judge Mark Bailey rejected the state’s argument that TPRs aren’t medical records because they don’t include the patient’s name: “the absence of a patient’s name from a TPR does not make it something other than a patient medical record, just as the absence of a driver’s name from a Bureau of Motor Vehicles driving record does not make it something other than a driving record.”
The appellate panel also pointed to the state’s own contradictions. Attorney General Todd Rokita’s office prosecuted Bernard before the Medical Licensing Board in 2023 for publicly disclosing a patient’s age, state of residence, gestational age, and approximate treatment date — the same categories of information contained in the TPRs the state later agreed to release. The court said those contradictory positions created legal uncertainty that was itself an injury, leaving doctors caught between their reporting obligations and their confidentiality obligations.
Voices for Life has argued the reports are essential to holding abortion providers accountable and verifying compliance with Indiana’s near-total abortion ban. The Health Department had released individual TPRs for years before halting the practice in 2023, citing patient privacy concerns after the state’s abortion law took effect and the number of reported procedures dropped sharply.
Monday’s denial does not formally end the case. The appeal concerned only the preliminary injunction, and the underlying lawsuit now returns to Joven’s courtroom for proceedings on the merits.
