Senate committee hears calls to tighten 2022 shield law to protect abortion and gender-affirming care

BOSTON — The Senate Committee on Steering and Policy convened a public hearing, streamed on the legislature's website, to gather testimony on proposed changes to Massachusetts’ 2022 shield law intended to strengthen protections for reproductive and gender-affirming health care against out-of-state investigations and hostile federal action.

Testifiers representing the attorney general's office, civil-rights and health-care organizations, clinicians and community providers urged lawmakers to close legal and technical loopholes they say leave patients and providers vulnerable. Many witnesses pressed for explicit enforcement authority for the attorney general, stronger limits on data sharing by state agencies and third-party vendors, and narrower reporting to the state Prescription Monitoring Program for medications used in reproductive and gender-affirming care.

"When Massachusetts passed its shield law in 2022, it was the first of its kind in the nation," said Allison Slater, director of Attorney General Andrea Campbell's Reproductive Justice Unit, describing the law as a foundational protection that nevertheless contains gaps to be fixed. Slater told the committee the attorney general's office is "watching these cases closely" where other states have attempted to prosecute providers and urged several statutory changes, including giving the attorney general explicit authority to enforce the shield law and extending the law's bar on law-enforcement cooperation to "all state and local agencies and their officers or employees."

The ACLU of Massachusetts recommended similar expansions. "There are so many touch points in state government for health-care information, including most obviously the Department of Public Health,"…