How a legal loophole allows anti-abortion prosecutors to obtain women’s secret health data

Some leading drug store chains turn over customers’ private health care information without a warrant.

The American legal system has a message for women concerned about their abortion rights: Don’t make the mistake of thinking that your pharmacist is your friend.

Thanks to a gaping loophole in federal health care regulations, some of our leading drug store chains turn over customers’ most sensitive private health care information to law enforcement agencies, even without a warrant.

That’s the finding of a subcommittee headed by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., which learned that all eight of the nation’s largest pharmacy chains have routinely turned over prescription records of thousands of Americans to law enforcement agencies or other government entities secretly without a warrant.