Reproductive Health Surveillance

It is estimated that one in four women will undergo an abortion and that over a quarter of women will face pregnancy loss. Nevertheless, the general public often underestimates the true rates of both pregnancy termination and complication. One likely reason for this underestimation is that reproductive health is something many individuals keep private from their friends, family, and coworkers. Yet, this personal secrecy is directly at odds with corporate data practices and commercial data sharing. In reality, a vast data ecosystem collects and monetizes all aspects of reproductive health. This ecosystem took on a new dimension in 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Since then, Dobbs has brought the lack of reproductive health privacy into stark relief and highlighted how intimate health data can be leveraged to identify and prosecute those seeking abortions. Reproductive health surveillance is omnipresent, expansive, and extremely problematic. But privacy concerns should not be limited to only protecting information about abortions or to only protecting information from access by law enforcement. Reproductive health, from contraception and pregnancy to infertility and assisted reproduction to pregnancy loss and abortion, are inextricably intertwined, and thus greater privacy protection of all reproductive health information is needed. Immediate solutions focus on individual self-management and company good will: women are encouraged to delete their period tracking apps or to adopt burner phones, and companies are pressured to make changes to their data collection and retention practices. More is desperately needed. Only with radical, sweeping changes to data privacy can we hope to move from reproductive health surveillance to meaningful reproductive health privacy.