A Nebraska woman has pleaded guilty to helping her daughter have a medication abortion last year. The legal proceeding against her hinged on Facebook’s decision to provide authorities with private messages between that mother and her 17-year-old daughter discussing the latter’s plans to terminate her pregnancy.
The case is a telling example of how Big Tech can be tapped to help prosecute abortion in the United States, where the Supreme Court in 2022 overturned Roe v. Wade, a 1973 decision that legalized abortion. Experts have warned that location data, search histories, emails, text messages and even period- and ovulation-tracking apps can now be used in the prosecution of people who seek an abortion and those who assist them, and this case shows they are right to worry.
Meta, which owns Facebook, could have challenged the legal order to hand over private messages to police, as it and other tech companies sometimes do on various grounds, but it didn’t. The private messages on Facebook Messenger show how the two discussed plans to terminate the pregnancy and destroy the evidence, including instructions from the mother on how to use the pills to end the pregnancy. Th …
