Planned Parenthood has seen an uptick in demand for abortions in states where they remain legal, like Oregon, since the Dobbs decision overturning Roe. v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court. (Photo by Dana DiFilippo/New Jersey Monitor)
In the wake of Oregon hospitals ending access to gender-affirming care for minors, dueling state policies over abortion and increasingly hostile federal actions toward transgender Americans, Oregon Democrats say the state’s protections for doctors and patients need an update.
House Bill 4088 awaits a House floor vote after Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee advanced it earlier this week. It would build on the state’s existing “shield laws” that since 2023 have sought to safeguard providers’ liability insurance and their personal information while protecting them from out-of-state prosecutions, investigations and professional discipline.
The Trump administration has subpoenaed hospitals and providers for providing gender-affirming care, issued warnings to breast binding manufacturers, and threatened some health care providers with prosecution. Those moves, combined with increasingly aggressive enforcement from Republican-led states which have sharply restricted abortion access and health care for transgender youth, spurred Oregon lawmakers to act.
“We’ve seen federal and interstate attacks on abortion and personal health decisions increasing,” Rep. Lisa Fragala, D-Eugene, a bill sponsor, told the Capital Chronicle. “States like Oregon have adopted shield laws to protect against these outside attacks, but with these increased attacks from the federal government and also incursions from other states, we’ve seen gaps.”
The new legislation would prohibit Gov. Tina Kotek from granting another state’s extradition request for a health care provider if they are engaged in providing reproductive or gender-affirming care in Oregon in a manner consistent with state law. That doesn’t apply if the person is a fugitive facing charges of treason or a felony, for instance.
It also contains new privacy protections and blocks state licensing authorities from revoking a midwife’s license if they faced a criminal conviction or discipline in another state for health care services that are unlawful in other states but allowed in Oregon.
The governor’s office told the Capital Chronicle that she has not received any extradition requests related to reproductive health or gender-affirming care. But Lucas Bezerra, a spokesperson for Kotek, said “care that is legal in Oregon is protected, and the governor will use every tool available to uphold those protections.”
“Health care decisions belong between patients and their providers, not politicians and certainly not prosecutors from another state,” Kotek said in a statement. “People come to Oregon because we respect personal freedom, privacy, and evidence-based medicine. Those values are reflected in our laws, and I will defend them.”
The bill would block publicly-funded agencies and state employees from cooperating with investigations into legal reproductive and gender-affirming care. The Oregon Health Authority, for instance, would be prevented from disclosing identifiable information of a person related to their use of such care during examination in a court or administrative proceeding.
The legislation comes as support for some policies involving transgender Americans’ rights has decreased, according to a 2025 poll from the Pew Research Center. A New York jury also issued a recent award of $2 million in a landmark malpractice suit against a patient’s plastic surgeon and psychologist for a breast removal surgery she received as a minor and came to regret. When it comes to abortion, 13 states nationwide have enacted near-total bans on abortion services.
In Oregon, meanwhile, access to health care for transgender residents has been hampered as more people fleeing other states’ restrictive policies have moved to the state. The advocates behind a ballot measure seeking to enshrine same-sex marriage, abortion and gender-affirming care protections in the Oregon Constitution also abandoned their signature-gathering campaign last week, calling it a “particularly difficult time, as the federal government continues attacking our rights, freedom, and basic humanity.”
Kaiser Permanente announced last year that it would be pausing gender-affirming surgeries for minors younger than 19 in Oregon. Attorney General Dan Rayfield also sued the federal government alongside 11 other attorneys general in January over a directive conditioning hundreds of billions of dollars in federal health and education funding based on compliance with Trump’s January 2025 executive order on “defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government.”
A “chilling effect” on care in Oregon
While Oregon hasn’t landed on the radar of another state seeking to extradite a doctor yet, Fragala said the possibility of that happening is far from speculative. California Gov. Gavin Newsom in January rejected Louisiana’s extradition request for an abortion provider, and another doctor in the state is facing a federal lawsuit in Texas from the boyfriend of a woman who claims her doctor improperly sent her abortion medication.
“I believe health care is a human right, and so we want it to be free from interference, stigma, surveillance,” Fragala said. “When those things are in place, it creates a chilling effect. And I think the loss of hospitals providing care, the loss of clinics providing this type of care, is a part of that.”
Alongside the heightened backlash from conservative states and the federal government, there has also been some movement among professional health care groups which has created an opening for opponents of gender-affirming care. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons also recently stated that it recommends waiting until age 19 for gender-affirming surgery for transgender youth, a move that the Trump administration has promoted but that is already in line with existing standards of care by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Other major medical groups support evidence-based gender-affirming care but with mixed positions on surgery, such as individual decision-making or waiting until adulthood.
The bill faced opposition from some Christian medical professionals and anti-abortion activists, including the Keizer-based Oregon Right to Life, which does not delineate exceptions for opposing abortions in the case of rape or incest.
Melissa Ohden, the Kansas City-based director and founder of the Abortion Survivors Network, told lawmakers at a public hearing last week that the bill would limit transparency and prioritize provider immunity over patient safety, particularly in the case of complications. Research has shown that complications occur in about 2% of elective abortions in the United States, and of that percentage, about a quarter result in hospitalization or a medical procedural intervention.
“Facing fear, uncertainty and trauma, women need information, documentation — like access to their abortion records, not legal barriers to oversight and accountability of the provider,” Ohden said.
Supporters of the bill included Kara Connelly, a pediatric endocrinologist and director of the gender clinic at Oregon Health and Science University’s Doernbecher Children’s Hospital in Portland. She testified that her clinic has faced doxing and death threats over the past few years.
“Speciality clinics at other institutions in Oregon have removed their websites entirely, causing confusion for Oregonians about which programs remain open and resulting in an influx of new referrals to our program which we do not have the capacity to take on,” she told lawmakers.
Potential U.S. Supreme Court battle looms
Amanda Barrow, senior staff attorney at the UCLA Law Center on Reproductive Health, Law and Policy, told the Capital Chronicle that Oregon’s legislation appears to respond to a “broader strategy” from legal efforts by states such as Louisiana and Texas to eliminate access to abortion “by any means.” She encouraged lawmakers to continue pursuing data privacy protections as well.
“If the extradition provision were enacted in Oregon, that law would generally prevent another state’s criminal action from moving forward against an Oregon-based provider in that state’s courts,” Barrow said. “That’s because it’s unlikely that another state could force the Oregon provider to appear in criminal proceedings in that state, and all defendants have a constitutional right to be physically present in the courtroom at the start of a felony case.”
The legislation would exempt from public records requests personal information related to the receiving or providing of gender affirming care or reproductive health care that is funded in part or whole by the state. Lawmakers also adopted an amendment that would expand privacy protections to encompass providers’ images and home telephone number, as well as their name, home address and professional address.
It’s unclear how disputes in federal court between conflicting state policies on such forms of care could play out. Barrow said the issue could find itself up for debate at the nation’s highest court.
“We are all expecting that a clash could make its way up to the Supreme Court for resolution,” she said, “but as of now, the shield laws are operating exactly as they intended.”
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