Reproductive Freedom for All Condemns Senate Confirmation of Erica Schwartz as CDC Director - Reproductive Freedom for All®

Formerly NARAL Pro-Choice America

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Reproductive Freedom for All Condemns Senate Confirmation of Erica Schwartz as CDC Director

For Immediate Release: Wednesday, August 5, 2026
Contact: [email protected]

Reproductive Freedom for All Condemns Senate Confirmation of Erica Schwartz as CDC Director

Washington, D.C. — Today, the U.S. Senate confirmed Erica Schwartz to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), despite her dangerous commitment to undermine abortion access and patients’ data privacy. During her confirmation hearing, Schwartz said abortion surveillance is “absolutely a critical component” of the CDC’s work and signaled the federal government could explore collecting more sensitive abortion data. The push to expand abortion surveillance is part of anti-abortion extremists’ broader strategy to monitor, restrict, and ultimately criminalize abortion access.

Schwartz’s testimony also sounded alarm bells around further criminalization of patients and providers following her pledge to ensure states are not “conflating” emergency services with abortion care and “hiding abortions” in emergency case definitions. In states with abortion bans, the distinction between abortion and emergency care has already been used to stoke fear, and delays in care have resulted in preventable suffering and deaths.

Schwartz also admitted she did not know the Trump administration had made reporting of cyclospora optional—a disturbing revelation as the parasite has infected thousands, with infections growing each day. As the new head of the nation’s top public health agency, Schwartz’s confirmation marks a troubling, continued departure from science and patient safety at the CDC.

Reproductive Freedom for All President and CEO Mini Timmaraju released the following statement in response:

“Erica Schwartz is the latest in a long line of extremists stacked in this administration to undermine abortion access and patients’ privacy. Her confirmation cements an anti-abortion agenda at the center of the CDC’s work, rather than containing outbreaks and keeping the public safe. Every senator who voted to confirm her will have to answer to their constituents for handing anti-abortion opponents another ally in the Trump administration.”

Schwartz will report to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has faced growing scrutiny over his efforts to politicize the nation’s public health agencies. In August 2025, Kennedy ousted CDC Director Susan Monarez less than a month into the job, after she refused to rubber-stamp the anti-vaccine recommendations coming out of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee, which Kennedy purged and restacked with vaccine skeptics. Under Kennedy, the country has since endured its largest measles outbreak in more than three decades, and the agency has gone without a permanent director while facing political interference, budget cuts, and staff reductions amid multiple outbreaks.

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For over 55 years, Reproductive Freedom for All (formerly NARAL Pro-Choice America) has fought to protect and advance reproductive freedom at the federal and state levels—including access to abortion care, birth control, pregnancy and post-partum care, and paid family leave—for everybody. Reproductive Freedom for All is powered by its more than 4.5 million members from every state and congressional district in the country, representing the 8 in 10 Americans who support legal abortion.