In the United States, the womb has been subject to political attacks, with their enforcement carried out by the technological and policing arms of the state. In the reproductive rights landscape, the weapon of choice is abortion bans. Additional weapons have included rape and forced childbirth imposed on Indigenous and enslaved Black women, the removal of children, coerced sterilization, and the pathologizing of menstruation as dirty or incapacitating. This violence is normalized through systemic racism, misogyny, criminal prosecution, healthcare denial, and surveillance carried out by both the state and private technology companies.
“I think that bodily autonomy, which, of course, includes unimpeded gender-affirming care, is central to any notion of freedom or liberation.” –Mariame Kaba
As abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba explains, when the body is controlled, people will remain subjugated. The state’s obsession with denying bodily autonomy has led to mass surveillance, starting with our phones at our fingertips to the cameras on street corners. Couple this technologically advanced world with the revocation of historic protections like Roe v Wade, and you get a violent deconstruction of bodily autonomy protections.
These days, personal health data joins this world of information that the state has access to and is eager to use. As reproductive autonomy comes under escalating attack, prioritizing health data privacy and developing privacy-first tools is essential for resisting the convergence of policy and technology in restricting abortion access.
The Criminalization of the Womb
Reproductive healthcare, including abortion, has not only been restricted, it has been politically divisive, surveilled, and criminalized by the anti-abortion movement. As states try to set their own pro-life precedent, people that seek abortion care or miscarry are at increasing risk for being criminally charged for health-seeking actions. For example, a woman in Ohio, a state with a 22-week abortion ban, came home from the hospital after having a miscarriage and was met with a warrant for her arrest. She was ultimately charged with a felony, for abuse of a corpse. The Trumbull County Grand Jury declined to indict her.
After Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022, states swiftly moved to pass restrictive abortion bans, increase criminal penalties, and expand surveillance of seekers and providers of reproductive care. As of July 2025, eighteen states have abortion bans or early gestational limits in effect, six states have no health exceptions, eight states have no rape or incest exception, and ten states have no fatal fetal anomaly exception. Increasingly, many of these states have moved to criminalize abortion. In 2023, South Carolina lawmakers proposed a bill that would subject women who had abortions to the death penalty. Georgia’s LIFE Act bans abortion at six weeks and recognizes “unborn children as natural persons”, creating the possibility that someone who has an abortion could be charged with murder. Florida’s six week abortion ban makes it so any person who “willfully performs or actively participates in a termination of pregnancy… commits a felony of third degree” punishable by imprisonment not exceeding five years.
Like in all battlegrounds, political or otherwise, marginalized communities largely bear the consequences of violence. Anti-abortion policy is deeply entangled with systemic racism, as surveillance and criminalization disproportionately impact Black women and other marginalized communities, deepening existing inequities and health disparities in reproductive care. Take the recent story of Adriana Smith, a resident of Georgia. Smith was nine weeks pregnant when she started to experience intense headaches. She sought medical treatment from a hospital, but was released without any tests or scans. Shortly after, she experienced a life-threatening medical crisis. Her boyfriend took her to the hospital, and she was declared brain dead. Georgia used its LIFE act to maintain her body on life support until the fetus could survive outside, leaving her family responsible for the medical bills. Her body was essentially being used as an incubator by the state. Few words can describe the horrific level of overreach, violation, and dehumanization Georgia perpetuated on Smith’s being. And yet, her removal of bodily autonomy is not unique.
When Your Digital Footprint is Evidence
“Whether abortion laws target providers, aiders and abettors, or women themselves, the criminalization of abortion necessarily involves the surveillance of women. Women’s bodies are often the so-called scene of the crime, and their personal data will, more likely than not, be evidence of the crime.” —Jolynn Dellinger and Stephanie K. Pell, The Brookings Institute
In today’s digital landscape, it is increasingly difficult to know which technologies and platforms can truly be trusted. Shoshana Zuboff coined the term surveillance capitalism to describe how corporations commodify and harvest personal data. While distinct from government surveillance, the two systems reinforce one another. The surveillance economy is made up of private and government actors that profit from surveillance mechanisms and control. Businesses and the government begin to function as one in the same, where businesses extract your data through their products, the government surveills you through its public infrastructure or contracting of external parties, and they come together to sell, exchange, access, and govern.
As the criminalization of abortion intensifies, it also becomes increasingly surveilled, turning every day data like search bar history, purchases, and even menstrual cycle tracking into potential evidence for prosecution. Period tracking apps are especially vulnerable data as anti-abortion legislation creates new legal risks. If the state is prompted into some kind of investigation regarding abortions or miscarriages, period trackers in the U.S. that collect data are legally required to hand over your data, which may then be used as evidence to investigate or prosecute you.
The possible external access or subpoenas of private health data is especially concerning when we consider how pregnant people have already been prosecuted for having miscarriages and early stage abortions. In Nebraska, a mother and her teenage daughter were charged with felonies after their Facebook messages were subpoenaed, showing that the mother bought an abortion pill for her daughter.
Most of your data is accessible by prosecutors and bad actors, including location data. In late October, 404 media reported that advocates from Atlas Privacy were able to access Locate X, a surveillance tool sold to law enforcement, by merely claiming they planned to “work with law enforcement in the future.” They then used it to track a device from Alabama, where abortion is banned, to a clinic in Florida, where the procedure is prohibited after six weeks.
From Google violating its promise to delete location data on abortion clinic visits to FLO selling extremely sensitive health and personal data to tech giants such as Facebook and Google, people—especially those seeking abortion care—are being mass surveilled and exploited, under legal duress and for profit.
What About Privacy Period Apps?
One of the most troubling new frontiers of personal data vulnerability lies in period tracking apps, which obfuscate the exposure of intimate health data in a useful health tool. Period tracking apps are consumer facing products unaffiliated with healthcare providers, and contrary to common perception, they are not covered by HIPAA protections. What makes these apps especially insidious is how they gain users’ trust by presenting themselves as safe spaces to track health, share experiences, and find community, while simultaneously making choices that allow user data to be exploited or even used against them. Operating within the surveillance economy, it remains more profitable to sacrifice user privacy than to protect it, leaving people vulnerable to exploitation, criminalization, and harm.
In response to the growing attacks, some developers are reimagining what a privacy-first model could look like. For example, apps like Euki and drip. intentionally avoid centralized data storage by relying on locally stored data (meaning user data only exists on the individual’s phone) and refuse to engage in third-party data sharing. Since Google searches can also be used against you, Euki even enables users to privately search U.S.-based abortion care providers and support options.
But, privacy-first apps are still far and few between. There is a broader difficulty of building ethical technology within an industry that profits from data extraction. Privacy focused products must find a balance between maintaining strong privacy protections and creating a user-friendly experience, all while competing with commercial platforms that profit at extraordinary margins from selling data.
In a conversation I had with Euki’s co-founder, Ana Maria Ramirez, she says that the calculus of risk assessment has had to change since the start of the year: “People who are well-intentioned might not realize the threats embedded in the convenience of their product stemming from collecting a lot of data.” The political and legal landscape under the Trump administration is rapidly changing, and legal protections that we might cling onto now, are violated later. In the wake of such attacks, it is evermore important that privacy and data protection becomes the main topic of discussion in health and technology spaces. This extends beyond abortion, as all health care data deserves privacy to ensure safety.
Until Health Data Privacy
In an environment where states like Texas and Florida are openly seeking access to people’s reproductive and gender health information, the stakes of digital privacy are no longer hypothetical. They are immediate, material, and life-altering, especially for people already criminalized by the state, including undocumented people, trans people, and Black and Indigenous communities. Whether it’s abortion surveillance, ICE accessing medical bills to identify targets, or health wearables willingly aligning with surveillance giants, the surveillance capitalism system operates as a self-perpetuating cycle in which personal health data is sold, exploited, and accessed by the state to prosecute, detain, and disappear people.
New apps demonstrate that it is technically possible to build digital health tools that exist in a violent political reality without extracting their data. However, as long as surveillance capitalism remains the dominant model, privacy will remain an exception rather than the norm. Until systems-level changes are made, it falls on users to stay vigilant and take privacy precautions. The work ahead lies not only in supporting these alternatives but in demanding a shift in how health technology is imagined, built, and governed.
See reproductive health privacy resources
Authored by Daira Rivera
Daira Rivera has a B.A. in Political Science from UC Berkeley and is based in the Bay Area. She is informed by anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggles and hopes that her work inspires people to protect one another against the growing threat of surveillance capitalism.
Art by Umu Ubuntu
