Written by Alyssa Tang
One year after Dobbs v. Jackson was passed, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra declared that “the Biden-Harris Administration will always defend a woman’s access to reproductive health care because our daughters shouldn’t grow up in an America where they have fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers.” However, with Trump’s win in the 2024 election, his nominee for the new HHS secretary, R.F.K. Jr., arrives with conflicting views on abortion. In the past, he had called for a nationwide abortion ban, but also cited that “it’s always the woman’s right to choose.” If his appointment is passed by the Senate, the future of reproductive surveillance is in tentative hands. Now, more than ever, it is necessary to be informed about the impacts of internet usage on health care.
The fight for abortion rights was settled in the 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade that enshrined the right for an individual to continue or end a pregnancy. In 2022, the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling overturned the decades-long standard, allowing the government to intervene in an abortion. Since then, the Guttmacher Institute reports that abortion has been banned in 13 states, while 8 other states have abortion bans in the first 18 weeks.
Reproductive rights being overturned is intertwined with digital surveillance control becoming a looming threat. Just as restricted abortion access gives the government control over women’s bodies, lack of online privacy gives the government control over digital lives. This year, the Senate passed RISAA, a bill that authorizes surveillance of foreign countries but has largely been abused to spy on Americans. Two-thirds of people on either party have cited unwanted data collection as a fear and violation of their right to privacy. With digital raids becoming more common, citizens’ most intimate details shouldn’t be at risk.
With a crackdown on abortions across red states, health privacy is no longer a sacred right. Women hide and cover their faces as they enter Planned Parenthood amidst anti-choice mobs. Although the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act—or HIPAA—protects patient privacy, healthcare information can be handed over in the case of a subpoena or court case. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services stated their post-Dobbs concern that the disclosure of protected health information for law enforcement could “cause harm to the interests that HIPAA seeks to protect, including the trust of individuals in healthcare providers and the healthcare system.” In 2024 April, the HHS issued the HIPAA Privacy Rule to Support Reproductive Health Care Privacy, prohibiting clinics from disclosing patients’ protected health information related to their reproductive health.
The extra security provision, however, is not guaranteed when the information is stored on patients’ personal devices. Five days after the Dobbs decision, the HHS issued urgent advice for patients seeking reproductive health care to turn off location services on their phones. Still, HIPAA does not cover the less-obvious evidence left behind in text messages, location tracking, searches, and period tracker apps—all of which can be used against abortion-seekers.
Reproductive rights are a confusing topic, and when one Google inquiry leads to another, the digital trail left behind can be incriminating. In 2017, Lattice Fisher was interrogated by the police for losing her pregnancy after revealing at an earlier check-up that she was pregnant. Police indicted her with searches for “abortion pills” they found in her phone. Although Fisher maintained that her baby was stillborn (a result in 1 every 175 pregnancies), her search history was used to indict her for second-degree murder with a $100,000 bond.
There are many different methods prosecutors use to get around HIPAA. With a keyword warrant, law enforcement can pull data on individuals who search keywords—such as “abortion pills” or “abortion clinic”. People at a certain location at a certain time can be known with a “geofence”. Digital warrants present complications with the Fourth Amendment, which guarantees protection in one´s home from unreasonable searches. One mobile app, SafeGraph, stores the location data of devices at Planned Parenthood and other family planning clinics. The data is later sold to advertisers or used as evidence.
In 2021, the FTC intervened with the period app Flo for selling user information to marketing and advertisement companies. Flo has since bolstered user protection with their Anonymous Mode, but other private information can still slip through the cracks. If even the terrifying notion of having a period tracker app be used against women in a criminal case is not enough, their search history is not safe either. If pressed by law enforcement, Google states in their privacy policy that they “will share personal information outside of Google if we have a good-faith belief that access, use, preservation, or disclosure of the information is reasonably necessary to meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process, or enforceable governmental request”. Since abortion has become a crime in many states, Google will be forced to hand over users’ information for court trials.
If passed, several federal data privacy acts may counteract the loss of reproductive privacy post-Dobbs. Planned Parenthood endorses the “My Body, My Data Act” by Congresswoman Jacobs which would prevent carriers from collecting or disclosing personal reproductive health information without written consent from the individual providing the information. Carriers must also provide individuals with the ability to easily delete the stored reproductive information upon request. The “Health and Location Data Act” pushed by Senator Warren would provide $1 billion in funding to the FTC to regulate the selling of location and health data. Greater data privacy laws also grant healthcare receivers more security of their personal information in general.
The future of abortion rights under the Trump administration is unknown: R.F.K. Jr.’s nomination has been opposed by abortion advocates, such as the president of Reproductive Freedom for All, Mini Timmaraju, but also anti-choice proponents such as former Vice President, Mike Pence. Despite what the future H.H.S. Secretary’s jurisdiction on reproductive rights may be, it still stands that restrictions on overreaching data surveillance would benefit all Americans and enshrine the
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