Pregnancy Panopticon
This report details the threat digital surveillance will pose to abortion seekers after the repeal of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The report finds that pregnant people and abortion seekers are already being prosecuted using electronic surveillance, including their search history, location data, and social media content. But the report warns that this threat is likely to dramatically accelerate in the months and years following Roe’s repeal, targeting abortion care nationwide.
Key Findings Include:
Police and prosecutors will expand existing surveillance of pregnant peoples’ search histories, online purchases, messages, and cellphone location data.
Healthcare providers will likely be forced to expand medical surveillance of pregnant people, particularly those suffering miscarriages.
Police are likely to broadly use geofence warrants to target pregnant people, forcing Google and other companies to identify everyone who came into a designated area (such as an abortion clinic) during a designated time.
Police are likely to purchase data from commercial data brokers, which they can currently do without any court oversight. This practice will leverage commercial databases that already use big data and machine learning to predictively identify pregnant people.
Anti-abortion police are likely to track abortion seekers who travel out of state, prosecuting them for obtaining an abortion upon their return.
The report details steps that abortion providers and pro-choice institutions can take to communicate with pregnant people more securely. The report notes that many leading abortion care providers currently allow third party tracking of their web traffic.
The report details steps that pregnant people can take to minimize their digital footprint while seeking abortion care. However, the authors note that these measures are (at most) a harm reduction strategy, and no steps can fully protect the public from anticipated abortion surveillance.
This report was supported in part by a grant from the Open Society Foundations and by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
