This was more than just some stuff patients themselves threw out (and seriously - do they hand that stuff out in a way that would lend itself to throwing in the trash in US medical settings? Around here it’s either something you really, really need to keep, or they won’t hand it to you in the first place. (Huh, never figured this just might be one reason for that.)

And sorry, but new/young/untrained employee is NOT an excuse in these settings. Anyone dealing with sensitive personal information (and few things are more sensitive than medical records, let alone in a clinic which performs abortions) should damn well be trained to be more careful. This is precisely the sort of thing that should not happen even as an isolated incident.

Besides, it’s not just such incidents. Take for example that clinic where they just had some third party garbage collection agency take out unshredded records. For that to even come close to happening in a medical setting is absolutely horrible. Anyone with the first clue wrt handling sensitive information will have garbage collection practices right up on the whiteboard within the first five or so minutes. This is not an incident, this is a problem of office culture within at least that clinic.

And frankly if you consider anti-abortion activists even half the threat they might just be this should concern you a lot more than it seems to. Protecting patient privacy really ought to outweigh lock-step defence of blue team.