Comment by footy
6 days ago
perhaps it has, but considering what American women in particular are risking if their menstrual data is leaked this doesn't seem like an example of said loss of meaning
6 days ago
perhaps it has, but considering what American women in particular are risking if their menstrual data is leaked this doesn't seem like an example of said loss of meaning
What specific safety risks could an American woman face if her menstrual data were leaked?
If your period stops long enough to suggest a pregnancy, and then resumes without giving birth on record, that's enough evidence that you might have terminated the pregnancy. This can be correlated with travel records to find that you used a clinic out of state, which is a crime in some jurisdictions.
I find it hard to believe this would qualify as "enough evidence" in any court of law. A straightforward defense could be that you simply stopped tracking for unrelated reasons.
Also, are there really criminal penalties for receiving an abortion? From what I’ve read, the criminal penalties are reserved for those who perform or facilitate them.
2 replies →
Pregnancy (even without elective abortion!) has a variety of risks of criminal prosecution in the post-Dobbs world, and prosecutors in some states where this is the case have expressed desire to use menstrual data to identify targets for investigation.
There's also sometimes significant risks of nongovernmental (particularly family and intimate partner) violence associated with situations that can be inferred from that data, which is one reason people often conceal things which might be inferred from it from selected other people.