Dr. Erica Schwartz, who on Wednesday became the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, made some alarming comments about abortion care during her confirmation hearings and signaled a potential increased surveillance of abortion patients.Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) asked Schwartz if she would commit to collecting better data on abortions, pointing to the CDC’s annual report of how many abortions are done each year in the U.S. The data program is voluntary, meaning some states like California, Maryland and New Jersey choose to not report annual abortion numbers to the federal agency. However, 44 states currently have some form of required reporting system for abortion care. “Abortion surveillance is absolutely a critical component of what the CDC is currently doing,” Schwartz responded. “I also want to make sure that certain states are not conflating emergency services and hiding abortions in that emergency services case definition,” she added. “We need to make sure we’re pulling out true abortions and making sure that we’re really having clear case definitions regarding abortions so the data is actually accurate.”There is no evidence that states are purposefully misclassifying abortion care when reporting statistics to the CDC. The implication that certain states are hiding abortion services behind the label of emergency care services is particularly egregious given that many women have died or nearly died after physicians denied them miscarriage care due to state-level abortion bans. “Erica Schwartz is the latest in a long line of extremists stacked in this administration to undermine abortion access and patients’ privacy,” Mini Timmaraju, the president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, said in a Wednesday statement. “Her confirmation cements an anti-abortion agenda at the center of the CDC’s work, rather than containing outbreaks and keeping the public safe,” Timmaraju continued. “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.”The Senate voted 51-44 to confirm Schwartz, largely along party lines — making her the first permanent director of the public health agency in the last year. Schwartz, a former deputy surgeon general during Donald Trump’s first term, is the first Black woman to lead the CDC.She steps into the role during a fraught time for the agency, which has floundered after the Trump administration laid off thousands of workers last year and many others resigned in protest. Previous CDC Director Susan Monarez was fired nearly a year ago after disagreeing with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccine ideologies. During her confirmation hearing, Schwartz made headlines for not distancing herself much from Kennedy’s views on vaccines, and some Democrats and public health officials worry she could become just another mouthpiece for vaccine misinformation.