The Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion
vice.com
vice.com
Sad, just sad, and a reminder that the technogical "innovation" (praised so highly here) is (oftetimes) much less about transforming the society and human lives for the better than it might appear from the hyped-up kool-aid spread generously to/by the tech crowd and the general populace.
28 weeks is, of course, 7 months. Third trimester elective abortion is illegal in the UK, Spain, France, Germany...
Yes, this is a total waste. Is this making the world a better place?
> And that Facebook gave that 17-year-old girl's private messages to the police to facilitate that prosecution.
I'm not surprised that Facebook complied with a lawfully issued search warrant.
It is both deeply tragic and entirely typical that a case like this is progressing in the US.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/27/22904650/meta-facebook-me...
This is, literally, a lie. Both messenger and WhatsApp have e2ee implemented.
So this is not clear cut now.
Note that there's a ~2 week difference in the week metric between the way we talk about pregnancy (weeks since LMP) and the way these laws are generally written (weeks since conception).
“Childbirth typically occurs around 40 weeks from the start of the last menstrual period (LMP), a span known as the gestational age. This is just over nine months. Counting by fertilization age, the length is about 38 weeks.”
I think that’s because months vary in length, making it relatively hard for people to count with them. Example: 28 weeks isn’t 7 months, it is slightly less than 6½ average months (6 months is a tiny bit over 26 weeks, and two weeks under half an average month)
The 17-year-old will be tried as an adult, on a felony and two misdemeanor charges.
Motherboard adds: "Facebook and other tech platforms have previously declined to say whether they would give law enforcement data that relates to abortion cases. This case shows that Facebook, at least, will and already has."
It's tragic to think of the circumstances that drove somebody to this, but you could say that about any act of violence.
(I'll probably get down voted for this because whenever I bring this kind of thing up people seem to get personally offended. Even though it's not your talking point, you picked up somewhere recently)
I think what most Europeans find difficult to understand is quite how partisan the US system is and how little support is available for those caught up in legal difficulties of this kind.
Just my impression of course, but impression seems to be what a lot of it is about.
Why should we care what the European standard for abortion is?
Whether or not they have other freedoms that we don't have is irrelevant.
It's unfortunate that Vice didn't bother to mention this.
> Survival rates for infants born at 28 weeks gestation is between 80-90 percent. Babies born at 28 weeks old only have a 10 percent chance of having long-term health problems.
The real question was why they (the defendants) felt they had to do it the way they did and couldn’t involve a medical professional.
The victims here are the two people who are standing trial, and no amount of, "Welllllll buuuuut, it was pretty late... soooo..." changes the fact that two women will needlessly have their lives and reputations destroyed.
28 weeks isn't even considered a "previably delivery". At that mark it's just called premature. In your ethical system, when does it gain the ability to be a victim?
Yes, there may be mitigating circumstances, and that should affect the severity of any punishment, but from the info I read here, it looks looks highly likely (1) these women are guilty, and because of that it IMO is good that the government tried to find out whether they were.
(1) one way they wouldn’t be guilty is if they neither knew nor suspected she was pregnant for over 20 weeks.
How do you know that about this case? "Statistically speaking" only works when talking about groups, not individuals.
That is, you probably expect a random child removed at 28 weeks to survive a greater fraction of the time than those spontaneously born at 28 weeks (which already survive at a very high rate).
Directly from the article:
>[28 weeks] is also later than Nebraska's 20-week abortion ban (abortion at 28 weeks is legal in about half the country; Nebraska's abortion laws have not changed since Roe v Wade was overturned).
We need to regulate these large, ubiquitous platforms as we would the town square or any other public infrastructure.
One should be able to have sex separate from concerns about having to carry a fetus to term.
- Facebook (fuck em)
- giving collected personal data (fuck that) to
- the police (fuck em) because
- a teen had an abortion (fuck yeah(?))
- and needs to be prosecuted because said teen presumably lives somewhere where this is illegal (fuck em)
once you get used to instinctively breaking these things and evaluating the way they emotionally manipulate you to click on them to read more, it's like "seeing the code" in The Matrix, you don't even need to read the article anymore because you've already parsed the intended emotional payload, and from there you can choose whether or not to digest it.
Purely from a people-programming standpoint, I respect them as masters at it.
It's not just Vice either. But the info-tainment nature of the brand seems to lend itself really well to it.
Could the fetus have survived? Who could say. Would the fetus have had a good quality of life? Who could say. I can say for sure that two humans are experiencing something truly, truly awful and may be forced into enduring the awfulness for years to come.
Can someone ELI5 why this is the standard? Shouldn't it be something more reasonable like "has a relatively developed brain", "can experience pain", "shows early signs of consciousness", "has major organs", "is a recognizably bipedal/human lifeform", etc? Every cutoff I've encountered seems to be entirely subjective and like it reduces down to "whatever I find politically expedient".
The very cynical side of me feels like the standard typically used was meant to buy as much time as possible for an abortion and not because it was grounded in anything scientific or morally conscionable.
Humans are somewhat unique in that they can't. Our fetuses are parasitic, and attempt to force the mother to carry them to term through endocrinological trucks. Except... We can now disrupt that parasitism and join every other mammalian species in giving mothers the authority over whether their bodies supply resources to a developing clump of cells within them.
We choose, however, in some parts of the world to not give women control of the resources in their body and instead tell them, "this fetus could become a human, so you are required to use your resources to make it so."
Until the fetus is viable on its own, it's literally in a parasitic relationship with the mother. It might have human-like traits, but until it's capable of surviving outside of that parasitic relationship, I'm inclined to give the mother the authority to say whether they want to play host.
I'm also not saying pregnancies shouldn't be terminable by choice, to be clear. I'm inquiring about how we justify placing the line where it is in the usual standard.
https://www.reading.ac.uk/news-archive/press-releases/pr9938....
It's a topic of much, much discussion, and I don't believe that it's deranged to discuss how human pregnancy is particularly unique in the chemical and hormonal ways the placenta interacts with the uterine wall.
Edit: for instance, human embryos attack and digest the urine wall, paralyzing the cells there and pushing growth hormones to the blood vessels to increase the blood supply to the placenta. Other mammals don't operate this way, the mother controls access to nutrients. Human embryos are so aggressive in seeking blood they typically leave behind clumps of cells throughout the mother's body, making the mother a generic chimera.
In other mammals, the placental wall is not breached, so a failed or terminated pregnancy doesn't have the network of paralyzed and intertwined arteries that a human pregnancy does, making it much more dangerous for human mothers. The human embryo is nearly unique in it's aggression in seeking out arteries.
One effect of human gestation is that the fetus has direct access to the mother's bloodstream, and injects hormones to regulate the mother's behavior - again, this manipulation is fairly unique - increasing blood sugar and blood pressure to serve the fetus even at the expense of the mother. A fetus may spend up to 25% of its protein intake on hormonal regulation of the mother (which, by the way, the mother's body tried very, very hard to shut down.)
It's a complicated and hugely messy affair, and in humans represents a literal fight for resources.
I think this is the first issue to address.
Contraception is for the woman to learn about, pay for and take, same for plan b, pregnancy tests and even abortions.
Pregnancy costs are for the mother to pay, for the mother to learn what to do about it, how to handle. Raising a child is for the mother to do. Shame related to all this is for the woman to endure.
I think any argument for forcing a woman to X, Y or Z would be much stronger if some equivalent contribution was provided to them for the service which they would be obligated to provide.
If all this education was provided properly and for free, access to all these paid for and readily available, if society or father's had to provide adequate in-full financial compensations without lengthy court battles, if father's were forced to be there at various step of the pregnancy, donate their own blood or organs if needed due to medical complications, take care of the child fully if the mother doesn't want it, etc. If women were given full pregnancy work leaves at no reduced salary, etc.
If you had that, you could posture to make abortion illegal, maybe minus certain medical related complications and maybe a few other scenarios like incestual rapes and all that.
Minus all that, I think it's hard to have a discussion about forcing someone to do something against their will, which will incur health repercussions, lifestyle changes, lifelong time and money commitments, and physical and mental pain.
We don't force people to give a hungry man some food. We don't force people to share their property with others. We don't force people to care for the elderly. We don't force people to pay for others medical expenses.
Generally it's done with some sense of equality though. That's probably the issue here. If we all shared the burden of child birth and raising children equally, you'd have a much stronger case. Then when someone says we should ban abortion, everyone would feel the trade offs of doing so. If you don't have skin in the game, it seems disingenuous to argue for.
I doubt this is true, especially given the fact that many people refer to kids as parasites.
Morally, arguments are just as strong in terms of the fetus putting the mother at risk, or the obligations on society to force the mother to behave in ways that care for the fetus and later for the child itself, with limited support or assistance.
Similarly, you can claim that life is life even if it obligates others to sacrifices of their own.
Both arguments also have their equal share of counterpoints.
The thing is, it's a decision, similar to deciding that suicide is a crime. You believe what you want, and choose what you'd prefer the rules to be, but society must kind of all agree to those decisions so we can coexist in harmony, find some compromise amongst ourselves.
For a lot of things, people tend to agree more easily on what they'd prefer. Would you rather have the right to kill others, but it means you could in turn be killed by others, or would you rather lose your right to kill and similarly have others prevented from killing you?
What if something lives inside you, drains you of energy, blood, minerals, food, could cause health complications, and will require lifelong time and financial support and commitment. What if you didn't consent to this thing living in you, maybe it was rape or accidental? Would you rather be allowed to choose to care for it or not? Or would you rather that had it been you living inside a host, you'd have the right to live no matter the choice of your carrier and to their sacrifice or to the circumstances of your conception?
Some people feel at that point, little would be lost to them, so they'd rather get to choose to carry or not. Others feel differently. Everyone might have their own reasons.
There are other options as well, often not discussed, because people are just trying to get their way most of the time.
Men don't have this problem at all, so it is less surprising when they think that the carrier should be forced to carry, since they will never be the one in the "being forced to carry" position themselves. Complicating the matter even more, since we're not all as impacted by the issue itself.
So often a compromise has to be found in practice. A middle ground looks like allowing it but not past some time, gives you enough time to decide what you want, but wait too long and the choice is made for you. Exceptions can be made for special cases, those can be listed.
You'll find people unwilling to compromise as well on both sides.
It's how it goes.
The point being, there is no science to draw on for the cutoff, unless you contextualize it with other arbitrary criteria, and even then, a lot of those criteria are subjective, like "consciousness", that's not a scientific concept, we cannot observe, prove or disprove it, understand nothing of it's mechanisms if it exists, etc.
I have absolutely no qualms with abortion in the event of life-threatening complications experienced by the mother at any stage of pregnancy. That seems perfectly reasonable. In fact, I think most supposedly 'pro life' states carve out such exceptions?
> or the obligations on society to force the mother to behave in ways that care for the fetus and later for the child itself, with limited support or assistance
> What if you didn't consent to this thing living in you, maybe it was rape or accidental?
Does it really take 20-24 weeks to realize and act upon this? Keep in mind I'm asking about where the line is placed, not about whether or not abortion should be permissible.
> The point being, there is no science to draw on for the cutoff
I disagree. Science tells us very precisely what kind of life is being disposed of at every stage of pregnancy.
People are being intellectually dishonest about this on both sides to serve their own purposes. Extreme pro-lifers, for example, will argue that life begins at conception merely because of the potential for it to become a child. My point was that setting the cutoff at "viability outside the womb" is equally as extreme and just as likely to be motivated by political expediency, in the opposing direction.
I see nothing in your comment that meaningfully invalidates that assertion.
Maybe some genetic test results came back indicating severe problems, or the mother got a diagnosis herself, or the father has backed out of support. It's hard to judge without intimidate knowledge of the circumstances.
I think a lot of them are explicitly not carving out any exceptions. But for some reason, it's really hard to get accurate acces to this information.
> Does it really take 20-24 weeks to realize and act upon this? Keep in mind I'm asking about where the line is placed, not about whether or not abortion should be permissible
I wasn't discussing what should or shouldn't be. Simply explaining why there's no easy way to gather consensus on where to draw the line.
In practice, in most places that allow abortions, there are already limits in at what point you can get an abortion. This is a common compromise between pro-life and pro-choice. I think only two states used to allow abortions at any point for any reason, all others had reasonable limits with carve outs for exceptions.
If you look at the statistics, an incredibly small number of abortions are made beyond the first few weeks. There's a lot of secrecy in the details, but it's likely those made after the first few weeks are cases of medical complications, unforseen life altering surprises (death of the father, financial bankruptcy), or were due to inability to actually get an abortion sooner, long waiting times, social stigma, etc.
> I disagree. Science tells us very precisely what kind of life is being disposed of at every stage of pregnancy
Things are a lot fuzzier than you claim.
Sometimes you can't even tell that there are two fetuses until the 20 week mark.
It's not that there's nothing you can observe, but what observations you consider important to use as a criteria on a cutoff is arbitrary. A beating heart? What does that mean? We can grow a beating heart in-lab, is that life?
A 6 months old baby? Is it conscious? Self-aware? You can try to see if it acts differently when seeing a photo of itself versus that of other babies, what does that truly tell you?
People can't agree on if a lobster feels pain when boiled alive...
That's what I mean by that you can't just appeal to science, you have to apply an arbitrary judgement to what science is able to observe.
> My point was that setting the cutoff at "viability outside the womb" is equally as extreme and just as likely to be motivated by political expediency, in the opposing direction
Yes, that's my point as well. I was arguing to your other point:
> Shouldn't it be something more reasonable like "has a relatively developed brain", "can experience pain", "shows early signs of consciousness", "has major organs", "is a recognizably bipedal/human lifeform", etc? [...] grounded in anything scientific or morally conscionable
My point is that none of these are any more or less reasonable. They're all based on some arbitrary rational we've agreed too.
If you're curious though, it's not "viability in the womb", it's actually "fetal viability", and it refers to the complete opposite, which is viability of the fetus to survive outside of the womb.
> Fetal viability is the ability of a human fetus to survive outside the uterus. Medical viability is generally considered to be between 23 and 24 weeks gestational age. Viability depends upon factors such as birth weight, gestational age, and the availability of advanced medical care
The argument goes, if the fetus can now survive without the carrier, on "its own", aka inside advanced medical incubating machines and under advanced medical supervision, the fetus is therefore no longer dependent on the carrier, that means instead of giving an abortion, you could remove the fetus and see if it'll live. The mother can therefore "end" her pragnency without resorting to aborting it, she can simply choose to accelerate the delivery instead.
Now some people think this is also a good criteria for the threshold to be considered alive, that you can survive on your own, independently, detached from a host. You could argue that it's reasonable to say life begins when you can survive as an independent organism (and maybe being dependent on machines and medical care counts as well).
Much more likely than not at 28 weeks. ~50% viability is like a month earlier than that.
> Would the fetus have had a good quality of life?
Roughly even or better chances of lasting complications. Of course, some percentage of babies delivered at every stage of pregnancy have a chance of lasting complications. You could throw a "who could say" after anything you want.
My point is you cannot apply the average case to each individual case. You don't have enough data to confidently say "more likely than not" for this case.
I'm working with the same information you are. All we know is that it was 28 weeks. That gives it a > 50% survival chance if delivered in a hospital in the US. You might come to a different number if you used different sources, or if you had more information. But "we can't know for certain" is just a truism; nobody's saying we know anything for certain. We're just estimating the probability based on what we do know.
Of course that is hyperbole as there is an adoption process, but if the baby was not wanted she could have had all of her medical bills covered and given the child to a family that desperately wanted to raise said child.
I’ll just pick a side, 28 weeks is too late. 12, ok. Maybe I could be talked into 15 even. 28 is just too late. Hell my wife and I would have raised the kid if that was the alternative to an abortion so late.
Never surprises me that HN is full of world-class doctors who can provide a medical conclusion based simply on a news story.
1. This is not a story about when a pregnancy can/should be terminated.
2. The person in this story is a child - 17 years old. Many times, what seems like normal weight gain ends up being a pregnancy. This is especially true for younger/skinnier folks.
3. Remove the hot-button issue - abortion - from this story and consider the implications. Two people were having what they thought was a private conversation.
HN crowd is not representative of the real world where FB/Messenger is essential AND where people don't understand privacy (and social) implications of using FB.
They can now be the poster girl(s) for two causes: "more abortion" and "facebook isn't private".
Plenty of criminals think they are having a private conversation, when in fact, the government is listening in.
What they did was a crime in Nebraska. It has been a crime in Nebraska for decades (centuries?).
The government used due process to get a subpoeona for information to investigate a crime.
Yes, the wounded parties here will feel like their privacy was violated, but from the information we have in the article, it seems justified.
The privacy and social implications have been the same for decades: your communications can be intercepted or retrieved by law enforcement, so if there is probable cause that you committed a crime, someone might go looking.
Companies definitely should disobey the law by refusing to comply with a valid search warrant in cases where someone is being prosecuted for having an abortion. Obeying the law in this case is clearly immoral!
This does not entail that obeying the law is always immoral, or even that breaking it is always moral. You can come to the conclusion that it is okay for companies to break some laws but not others in at least two perfectly reasonable ways: you can believe that breaking laws is not in itself a bad thing (but that actions that break some law may be bad for some other reason, such as harming people), or that it is a bad thing but in some cases the lesser of two evils.
However, in practice it may be difficult for a company to organize such disobedience, particularly since, for example, Facebook cannot avoid hiring employees from religious groups who are in favor of these laws, and also because the court order may not inform Facebook what the case is about. So, a more practical approach is to avoid being in the position of surveilling people's private communications in the first place, so that no employees at the company have access to the information the police seek. End-to-end encryption is a crucial structural protection against this kind of pervasive surveillance, because it prevents intermediaries from having the private information in the first place. Pseudonymity is another one: the teenager should never have given Facebook her legal name, but unfortunately Facebook has extensive policies in place to extort legal names from its users, making them vulnerable to such abuses.
Of course talking about encryption always brings out the knuckledraggers who link to XKCD 538 and talk about hitting people with $5 wrenches. Hopefully this example clarifies why encryption sometimes defeats a $5 wrench: neither Celeste Burgess, the Nebraska teenager, nor the Facebook employees were ever at risk of being beaten with a wrench in this case.
(originally https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32402302, edited a bit)
I like living in a country where it's illegal to kill babies on a whim, thank you very much. So no, while you might disagree with this law, it's not at all "clear".
> Of course talking about encryption always brings out the knuckledraggers who link to XKCD 538 and talk about hitting people with $5 wrenches. Hopefully this example clarifies why encryption sometimes defeats a $5 wrench: neither Celeste Burgess, the Nebraska teenager, nor the Facebook employees were ever at risk of being beaten with a wrench in this case.
Facebook employees who refused to comply with a warrant would absolutely be thrown in jail once they ran out of lawyers and money (admittedly a process that would probably take years). Just look at the ProtonMail guy.
You might want to consider that the kind of inflammatory language you're using tends to make productive argument much less likely.
> Facebook employees who refused to comply with a warrant would absolutely be thrown in jail
I think it is very unusual for employees to end up in jail because their corporate employer was found guilty of contempt of court. In particular, I don't think any ProtonMail employee has ever been thrown in jail. We know about cases where companies have successfully refused to introduce cryptographic backdoors into their software; even in the case of the unnamed climate activist https://www.techdirt.com/2021/09/10/protonmail-turned-over-f... ProtonMail was only ordered to provide his IP address, not inject backdoored encryption into his browser to steal his email.
We also know about cases, for example in Germany, where police have injected malware into customers' devices, and as I understand it, companies are required to assist in this. This is not the established law in Nebraska, although it is surely happening covertly in the US in some cases.
You might want to consider the same about statements like "the law is clearly immoral". I don't think my response was disproportionate.
> I think it is very unusual for employees to end up in jail because their corporate employer was found guilty of contempt of court.
Unusual, yes, but far from unthinkable; there simply aren't many cases where both sides fight to the bitter end, because the threat doesn't have to be carried out in order to have power. And of course if you can make someone unemployable then you don't need to jail them directly.
> We know about cases where companies have successfully refused to introduce cryptographic backdoors into their software
We do? When?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93Apple_encryption_d...
Why can't we draw a line somewhere before 28 weeks and say that if you want an abortion, you have to decide before 7 months have gone by?
I can't imagine thinking that it should be legal to kill a full term fetus as it's being delivered solely because it hasn't been born yet.
As for "legal to kill a full term fetus as it's being delivered", of course that is not what is alleged to have happened in this case, and it is wrong, but most people who ever lived disagreed with me about this; as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide helpfully explains, "Most Stone Age human societies routinely practiced infanticide, and estimates of children killed by infanticide in the Mesolithic and Neolithic eras vary from 15 to 50 percent. Infanticide continued to be common in most societies after the historical era began, including ancient Greece, ancient Rome, the Phoenicians, ancient China, ancient Japan, Aboriginal Australia, Native Americans, and Native Alaskans."
However, surely even if you and I disagree on which acts are real crimes, we can agree that pervasive surveillance by Facebook aids in the prosecutions of many real crimes. But that is not enough to show that it is desirable; it also enables unjust government persecution of people who are doing things that are illegal, but should not be, and this must also be weighed in the balance. From my point of view it is evident that this is such a case. Perhaps your example would be something different: Christians being persecuted for holding worship services in their homes, for example, or the Righteous Among the Nations secretly protecting Jews in their houses during the Holocaust.
In short, totalitarianism is not transparently the best form of government, and for many of us this case illustrates the dangers to liberty from Facebook's pervasive surveillance.
We know what Nebraskans think about abortion - they made a 28 week abortion illegal. No mesothilic civilisation is relevant here.
If you think a 39 week abortion is wrong, as you say - at what point between 28 and 39 does the abortion become wrong, using the facts of this case?
You've already moved the goalposts away from all abortion law is immoral to agreeing with my example.
The real issue here is someone tried to abort a 28 week old fetus?
Only Americans find this acceptable. It's a fringe and extreme position in all of the developed world to abort a viable fetus on-demand. I continue to be shocked at the permissiveness of American abortion law.
I hope this ends in conviction of those responsible.