Even the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party, former President Donald Trump, has said that states could monitor women’s pregnancies to support abortion bans. If these efforts succeed, women may not only be second-class citizens vis-a-vis men but also vis-a-vis the fetuses and maybe even embryos. Read more at The Hill
Harris and Biden both blame Trump on abortion. How they do it is very different. In a Time Magazine cover story that ran Tuesday, however, Trump indicated that if elected president he wouldn’t get in the way of states’ monitoring women’s pregnancies and wouldn’t commit to vetoing a federal abortion restriction. Harris seized on the … Read more
Consistent with the anti-abortion movement’s goal of a nationwide recognition of fetal personhood, the criminalization of abortion is a tool for preventing abortions from ever occurring. In our new article, Bodies of Evidence: The Criminalization of Abortion and Surveillance of Women in a Post-Dobbs World, we explore: how ban states are criminalizing abortion; the way … Read more
Those plans — and many more, including proposals to attack contraception access, use the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to increase “abortion surveillance” and data collection, rescind a Department of Defense policy to “prohibit abortion travel funding,” punish states that require health insurance plans to cover abortion, and retool a law that is currently … Read more
We have entered an era not of unsafe abortion but of widespread state surveillance and criminalization—of pregnant women, certainly, but also of doctors and pharmacists and clinic staffers and volunteers and friends and family members, of anyone who comes into meaningful contact with a pregnancy that does not end in a healthy birth. Those who … Read more
The anti-abortion movement is—no surprise—committed to stopping this flow of patients and abortion pills across state lines. One strategy that has recently emerged is an effort to revive and reinterpret the Comstock Act, a 19th-century anti-vice law that the movement claims makes sending or receiving any abortion drug or device in the mail a federal … Read more
A case out of Nebraska involving a mother and her teenage daughter could offer a preview of how digital footprints could be used to enforce abortion laws. Read more at 19th News
“After the fall of Roe, we’re realizing that everyone is at risk from every segment of society,” she said. “So I’m hopeful that this is an opportunity to help more and more Americans realize how dangerous state surveillance is for all of us.” Read more at Huffpost
But just because Big Tech companies collect the most information on Americans, that doesn’t mean Facebook or Google will inevitably be the primary force driving abortion-related arrests. As abortion access becomes further restricted nationwide—and new legal gray areas emerge as other states pass laws attempting to protect access—the courts will have to decide which laws … Read more
“Right now – without doing anything – schools may be getting alerts about students” who are searching the internet for resources related to reproductive health, Laird said. “If you are in a state that has a law that criminalizes abortion, right now this tool could be used to enforce those laws.” Read more at The … Read more
