Arkansas Bill (2021) Establishing a Database for Tracking Women Seeking Abortion | Hacker News Reader

Arkansas Bill (2021) Establishing a Database for Tracking Women Seeking Abortion

trackbill.com

104 pointsf38zf5vdt58 comments

>To create the Every Mom Matters Act; To provide healthcare support to pregnant women in Arkansas; And to stabilize families and reduce the number of abortions performed in the state. And for other purposes.

Everyone who calls the hotline (per legal requirement) would be entered into the database. The hotline is in Texas, costs $175,000 to set up and $4.8 million to operate. Expected to be functional by 2023.

https://www.5newsonline.com/article/news/politics/arkansas-l...

Time to figure out how to convince people that a database auto-increment primary key is the mark of the beast.

I hope that the engineers working on this stop. Ethics in tech are uncommon but goodness we could use some more.

There are pro-life engineers out there. Moreover, this appeal to morality hasn't worked for any other tech issue out there.

> pro-life

The more accurate correct term is anti-choice.

That's still too broad, the more accurate term would be pro-state-coerced-birth. Less punchy, I admit.

You don't have to agree with their axioms to understand how a small number of simple axioms lead to their beliefs, right?

The hard truth that few people talk about is that very few people believe in banning early abortions of unviable fetuses or in cases of rape, very few people believe in allowing elective abortions of viable fetuses in the 40th week, and it's hard to find an objective scientific line in the middle ground.

It's a problem requiring a very nuanced compromise in a society that has a very hard time with nuance, and as a result, is having a harder and harder time with compromise.

You don't need an objective scientific line; any sort policy being codified into law (in any context, not just abortion) will be subject to interpetation, exceptions, and context. Instead, you just need a reasonable compromise. And as far as reasonable compromises go, we had a quite good one until hours ago, when states began stripping our rights away.

It is possible to be against abortion for oneself while also supporting the rights of other people to make that decision themselves. Abortion is not a recreational drug that people take just to have a good time, it's a harrowing medical procedure that is unfortunately necessary.

I agree with you there. It's just the snarky tone of your higher up post seemed to indicate an over-simplified view of the anti-choice stance. I disagree with them, but they aren't necessarily stupid or insincere.

True, as they are often comfortable with capital punishment, seem ok with war and don’t give a sh*t about fetuses once they’re born.

Pro Forced birth has become my go to descriptor.

This is definitely in the vicinity of The Handmaid's Tale ballpark of registering women for observation and tracking.

Or everyone should just call it, spam that unethical evil bullshit to hell.

I hope so too, but hope isn't a sustainable solution. Even if the engineers building this quit in protest, how hard is it to find someone to put a web interface in front of a mySQL database?.

We need to encode privacy rights in law, and build systems which hold elected officials accountable for the results of their work.

If you're seeking an abortion, be careful not to communicate that fact using any service that stores data in one of the regressive states, lest the state government subpoena that service so that they can put you on a watchlist like this.

Better yet, treat the situation like you're assembling a bomb: Mullvad/Tor, Signal, DDG, clean phone/laptop if you can afford it. Adtech surveillance/tracking is extremely pervasive at this point and it's hard to be sure where data about you will end up.

Duckduckgo is just a skin on top of bing and I sure wouldn't say it's a smart idea to search bing for bomb recipes.

That's a pretty bold claim, do you have any sources?

https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/17/brave_duckduckgo/

https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/25/duckduckgo_browser_mi...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19380174

https://torrentfreak.com/duckduckgo-restores-pirate-sites-an...

More generally, once you realize your state is authoritarian, it might be too late to cover your tracks. Always protect your privacy, even when you think it'll be fine.

Yes, it is very possible the next step in these states is to declare it murder. I am not kidding.

I wonder how long it'll be before organizations that provide abortion services to out of state women will be declared more or less terrorist organizations in red states and you'll get arrested for donating to them...

Related....

Data Broker Is Selling Location Data of People Who Visit Abortion Clinics

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31250805

I am glad that EU has GDPR and this thing would be short lived and expensive.

How do we pollute it with garbage?

Stuff it full of 10% or higher people. They have daughters who go oops as much as any other and deserve the attention and excitement, especially if they make foreign trips.

Ping anonymous?

Oklahoma, too [1]. So much for "small government".

[1] https://news.yahoo.com/oklahoma-wants-database-track-women-1...

They'll give a pregnant woman health care, but then at 2 yrs old they assume the baby can fend for itself, and no more health care.

Their bill is literally a George Carlin bit.

“Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to 9 months. After that, they don’t wanna know about you. They don’t wanna hear from you. No nothing! No neonatal care, no daycare, no Head Start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you’re pre-born, you’re fine, if you’re preschool, you’re fucked.” - George Carlin

But we have all the stuff. Medical care is free to the poor. Housing is free to the poor. Food is free to the poor. School lunch was free to everyone the last few years and continued to be reduced or free to lower income.

The scope and breadth of federal, state and local programs in this country would is mind boggling.

I currently work at a former startup in this area and my wife works with low income families.

One caveat I’ll add: even with the huge account of public and private money spent in this area, it can never be enough.

When something is free that everyone needs is there is almost infinite demand.

The poor don't get free housing. Homeless shelters do exists, largely subsidized by private charities, and there are way too few of them, and they are incredibly dangerous. For those who get Section 8 vouchers (after waiting for years), nobody will take them.

There is a good chunk of free food out there, but not in food deserts, which of course disproportionately affect poor minorities.

If medical care is free to the poor, why does everyone have to go to the emergency room, and why are firefighters acting like EMTs with big red trucks? Why are there so many physically and mentally ill people on the streets?

School lunches continue to be defunded (even this year, during a pandemic, during massive inflation) and not available enough in poor minority communities.

https://www.arkleg.state.ar.us/Bills/Detail?id=HB1195&ddBien... works a bit better for me - full text was broken in the trackbill UI

A bill is a proposed law. Was this passed and enacted?

Act 90 of the session. The votes are listed lower in the document.

Yes, passed early last year and it goes into effect at the start of 2023.

I’m not a big fan of your implication that there’s something wrong with discussing legislation while it’s still pending, though. That’s honestly the best and most useful time for people to be discussing it.

I don't think parent implied that at all. This is a global forum, there is no need for this forum to debate bills in a small corner of one country with little technology presence.

> in a small corner of one country with little technology presence

I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Acxiom is headquartered in Conway, AR: https://www.acxiom.com/about-us/locations/

They’re a very well-established datamining company. In fact, they’re the first ones I recall hearing about, like twenty years ago.

> I’m not a big fan of your implication that there’s something wrong with discussing legislation while it’s still pending, though.

There is something wrong with it. Lots of bills get proposed all the time. Many die in committees or they have no hope of being passed, or they might be passed in one house but have no chance of getting passed in the other, making them little more than a symbolic gesture. It's important to understand the context before demanding everyone get all freaked out and outraged about something that might not have ever been even remotely possible.

Thanks for clarifying that it was passed, that's important and relevant information.

Those legally gray firearms databases were not a good precedent.

I think the events of this week should put an end to this line of argument, which claims that protecting gun rights will have a positive halo effect on all other human rights.

Or perhaps the takeaway should be that lawfare can invite more lawfare.

Why are we assuming this wouldn't have happened either way? It seems to me that the repeal of Roe v. Wade is the only precedent necessary. Given that abortion is illegal in Arkansas, the tracking of women seeking abortions is far less legally grey than the tracking of gun owners.

I'm not sure why the idea "If we pass laws, we will additionally pass laws in the future" is supposed to be interesting.

Yes, passing laws is one of the functions of government.

The premise of lawfare is that you enact laws and legal precedents primarily with intent of undermining your opponent, rather than to benefit anyone in particular. The American right just realized that they can do this too.

"Too"?

Please elaborate. From what I've seen, the right has done this a long time, be it dumbing down education, defunding social services, advocating for war to benefit their lobbyist friends, or restricting access to nature's bounty.

Punishment is in the eye of the beholder: the left and right don't care about the same issues, and that's the principle that makes it possible to hurt your opponent through lawfare without hurting yourself. Eliminating federal protections for abortions annoys the left without hurting the right. Conversely, banning religious services during covid while promoting protest gatherings bothered the right, but not the left. You wouldn't be able to list the lawfare issues that bothered the right, because that's the point. Lawfare is only lawfare to your opponent, not to yourself.

So your contention is that conservatives don't need abortions, and liberals don't go to church?

No, your answer avoids the point you made. You made a specific claim that the left was using lawfare first. Please elaborate on that.

If you choose to ignore the example I just gave, that's on you, but luckily I can provide additional examples from the last few years:

- bans on legal ownership of certain types of firearms while simultaneously weakening firearms penalties for the primary types of gun violence: gang and drug crimes

- using lawsuits and legal harassment to shut down right leaning personalities, businesses, and institutions

- selective prosecution by activist DAs, depending on political alignment

Shall I list more? And, again, these are supposed to be things that you feel are justified, but the right does not, because that's the purpose of lawfare.

> Eliminating federal protections for abortions annoys the left without hurting the right

I have to assume you mean emotionally, not physically. Conservatives have women in their lives who will suffer and die from legal interference in the process of pregnancy and childbirth also.

Oh no! Now that the right has "just realized this", they might try to overturn the American Care Act primarily with intent of undermining their opponent, rather than to benefit anyone in particular.

Are you implying that registering firearms and background checks don't benefit anyone and only undermine republicans?

Ah yes, without that it wouldn't have happened.

You've solved it! All this time, abortion rights would've been maintained if that one law had not been passed.

This will be useful when Gilead needs to select handmaids.

Wonder which provider they're going to use.

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