Plus, how Facebook/Meta plays a role in this
Estimated reading time: 2m 45s
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One year and one month after the official release of the Dobbs decision that gutted what remained of a nationwide right to abortion in the US, lawmakers have been using the criminal justice system to punish abortion seekers across the country. Last week, a teenager in Nebraska was sentenced to 90 days in jail and two years of probation for using abortion pills to end her pregnancy last year. Her mother is awaiting sentencing after taking a plea deal for helping her daughter obtain the pills. The police and prosecutors who handled their case were aided by Facebook/Meta, which turned over the women’s chat logs referencing their conversations about terminating the then-17-year-old's pregnancy in April 2022. In March of this year, a woman in South Carolina was arrested and charged for using medication to terminate a pregnancy in 2021. Under South Carolina law, self-managed abortions are illegal, as are abortions after six weeks. (Note: At the time the woman in question took the pills, South Carolina law banned abortion after 20 weeks (about 4 and a half months). Currently, the 6-week abortion ban is going before the state supreme court.) |
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(Image credit: Abbey Crain) |
The story of “how we got here” is well-trodden territory at this point. Roe was severely weakened long before Dobbs issued the death blow. Even before it became official, states like Texas, Mississippi and Alabama were lining up to win a race to the bottom to see who could gut abortion rights as fast as possible for their respective citizens. Abortion is illegal in all three states, although Texas does have some very narrow exceptions. However, those narrow exceptions haven’t been enough to spare patients from illnesses like sepsis or the torment of carrying a non-viable pregnancy to term. |
(Photo credit: Mark Felix/AFP via Getty Images) |
Some states are now going a step further. Not content to punish people within the borders of their states, attorneys general in Texas, Ohio, Alaska and 16 other states are now looking to persecute people who travel across state lines for abortions and gender-affirming care. Several Republican attorneys general signed a letter addressed to the Secretary of Health and Human Services and authored by the AG of Mississippi to argue against a proposed HIPAA rule change that would prevent state authorities from obtaining citizens’ health records for investigations into out-of-state abortion care. Combined with Meta’s willingness to turn over people’s information as the company did in the Nebraska case, our post-Dobbs world is a pretty bleak one. Millions of people live in states where their options for abortion are extremely limited or non-existent, availing themselves of out-of-state options may put them under surveillance and trying to use discreet options like abortion pills could end with their chat logs being read in court. |
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Thanks for reckoning with me, Aria |
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