In May 1972, Chicago police raided a high-rise apartment where a group called Jane Collective performed abortions. It was a year before Supreme Court ruling Rowe v. Wade gave women the constitutional right to decide whether to give birth, and abortion was a crime in Illinois.
Seven women were arrested, including two who had the names and addresses of patients on index cards in their bags. According to a story written by a team member, Jane’s Story, the women destroyed the cards in the police van on the way to the station, tearing them to pieces and eating some of them. They did not know what the police could do with the information, so they got rid of it.
Fifty years later, the Supreme Court overturned Roe’s decision. Abortions will be banned or severely restricted in much of the country. But now, thanks to the digital footprints left in the modern technological age, it will be much harder to hide incriminating evidence of a termination decision.
When the court’s draft decision expired for the first time in May, and then when the decision became official last week, people focused on these digital footprints, in particular the information that millions of women share about their menstrual cycles in tracking applications of periods. The advice of the knee was simple and direct: Delete them all. Immediately.
“Delete these fertility apps now,” tweeted Gina Neff, a sociologist and director of the Minderoo Center for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge. In an interview with Zoom, Dr. Neff said the apps contained “powerful information about reproductive choices, which are now a threat.”
These applications allow users to record the dates of their menstrual cycles and get predictions about when they are ovulating and are most fertile. The applications can also serve as digital diaries for sexual activity, birth control methods and attempts to conceive. Some women use the apps when trying to conceive, others to avoid it, and very simply to know when their next period is coming.
The exhortations to get rid of them seem to have had the opposite effect. According to Data.ai, which monitors activity in the app store, downloads of tracking apps for the period have doubled in the days since Roe’s cancellation, compared to average weekly downloads in the previous three months.
Clue and the little-known astronomy-based periodic tracker, Stardust, won the most, and both made public data protection commitments following the Supreme Court ruling. A Clue spokeswoman said the European-based company would not comply with consumer health information requests from US law enforcement.
While cycle tracking tools appear to be an obvious source of information on reproductive health decisions, experts say other digital information is more likely to put women at risk. Cynthia Conti-Cook, a civil rights lawyer and technology associate at the Ford Foundation, investigated the prosecution of pregnant women accused of murder or endangering their fetus by cataloging the digital evidence used against them in an academic report she published in 2020.
“We need to start with the types of data that have already been used to criminalize people,” said Ms. Conti-Cook, who previously worked at the Public Defenders’ Office in New York. “The text next to your sister that says, ‘I’m pregnant, I’m pregnant.’ The history of searching for abortion pills or visiting websites that have information on abortion. “
One of the cases Ms. Conti-Cook pointed out was that of Latice Fisher, a Mississippi woman who was charged with second-degree murder after giving birth to a stillborn child at home in 2017. According to a local report, investigators withdrew the contents on her phone, including her Internet search history, and she “admitted to performing Internet searches, including how to induce a miscarriage” and how to buy abortion drugs such as mifepristone and misoprostol online. Following considerable public attention, the case against Ms. Fisher was dropped.
In another case, in Indiana, text messages to a friend about taking abortion pills late in pregnancy were used to convict Purvi Patel, who successfully appealed and reduced the 20-year sentence for fetal homicide and neglect of addiction. face.
“These text messages, these websites visited, these Google searches are the exact proof of intent that prosecutors want to fill their bag with evidence,” Ms. Conti-Cook said.
Investigators could also potentially use smartphone location data if states pass laws banning women from traveling to areas where abortion is legal. Traffic information collected through apps on their phones is regularly sold by data brokers.
When The New York Times investigated alleged market anonymous data in 2018, it was able to identify a woman who spent an hour at Planned Parenthood in Newark. In May, a journalist from Vice managed to buy information from a data broker for phones that were transferred to Planned Parenthoods for a week for only $ 160. (Following Vice’s report, the data broker said he planned to stop selling data on visits to the healthcare provider.)
In the past, anti-abortion activists have “geophrased” Planned Parenthoods by creating a digital border around them and directing phones entering the area with ads directing owners to a website designed to dissuade women from terminating their pregnancies.
There are similar attempts to attract the attention of people who go online to seek help for abortions. Crisis Pregnancy Centers aim to be at the top of Google search results when people search for information on how to terminate a pregnancy. When someone clicks on such a website, they will sometimes try to gather information about the person.
Given the many ways in which human traffic, communications, and Internet search are tracked digitally, the bigger question may be how zealous law enforcement will be in states with abortion bans. Those who advise not to use follow-up periods seem to be afraid of the worst: a dragnet-style search for anyone who has been pregnant and then ceased to be.
“It’s hard to say what will happen where, how and when, but the opportunities are quite dangerous,” Ms. Conti-Cook said. “It can be very easy to be overwhelmed by all possibilities, so I’m trying to emphasize what we’ve seen used against people.”
She added: “Google search, websites visited, email receipts. That’s what we saw. “
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