# Plain Language Summary of the SOULS Act

This bill would require the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—the federal agency that tracks disease and health statistics—to count abortions as deaths in their official mortality statistics. Currently, the CDC tracks deaths from disease, accidents, suicide, and other causes, but does not include abortion data in their death counts and death rates. This bill would change that by instructing the CDC director to add abortion numbers to the overall death statistics "to the extent possible."

The practical effect would be that national death rates and mortality statistics would increase to include abortion figures. When the CDC publishes reports about how many Americans died in a given year or what the leading causes of death are, those reports would now incorporate abortion data. This would change how Americans see health statistics and mortality trends—for example, the overall death rate would be higher than it currently appears, and abortion would become part of the official mortality picture rather than being tracked separately or not at all.

The bill doesn't create any new requirements for doctors, hospitals, or women seeking abortions. It's purely about how federal health statistics are collected and reported to the public. However, the practical impact depends on how the CDC would actually implement this—the bill says they should do this "to the extent possible," which leaves room for interpretation about what data sources they would use and how they would count these figures alongside traditional mortality statistics.

SOULS Act

Cawthorn, Madison

Seeking Official Uncounted Lives Statistics Act or the SOULS Act This bill requires the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to include abortions, to the extent possible, when collecting and making available data on U.S. death numbers and rates.