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Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

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Maybe you are completely unaware, but many US states have criminalized abortion. Pregnancies and abortions are detectable from menstrual data.

With this in mind, why do the users trust these companies in supplying that data? I’m asking this is earnest.

Most abortions do not result from planned pregnancies.

It's not a problem until it suddenly is.

Miscarriages are also being criminalized in the US.

Which section code?

When miscarriage happens, you will be hit with non-miscarriage section and unable to prove it was miscarriage. Or, you will prove it only after your life was significantly altered and you had to spend a lot of money.

Like common. This literally happens in conservative states. And women are also literally dying or suffering there for preventable medical issues, because doctors are afraid to abort even when they know it is necessary and pregnancy is not viable.

The common cases I looked into turned out to be misreported on.

Unfortunately all the mainstream media lie with a smile (as we saw with “Biden is so smart!” coverage from the NYT etc. over the last year), so it’s getting hard to know what’s happening…

Uhm ... so if you read right wing conservative media, all mainstream media lie. Yeah, totally.

What we see in mainstream media is constant whitewashing and sane washing of Trump. Constant excuses for conservatives and for republicans. But it is never enough for you, they should also lie about harm your policies are causes.

So, yes, doctors are afraid to perform life saving procedures and conservatives applaud it.

I don’t read any right wing conservative media, it’s too absurd. It’s also absurd the left wing media ignored the biggest story of the century while the average American was wondering why…

Miscarriages are spontaneous abortions. The anti-abortion laws are being used against women who have miscarriages.

Miscarriages are not spontaneous abortions to those in the medical field. Sorry if the terms are confusing though.

I should clarify; some miscarriages are spontaneous abortions when the body decides the fetus is not viable.

Women are being convicted of murder / abortion related charges when no fetal cause of death is established.

You are, as another pointed out, being disingenuous about a very real problem.

You are being snarky and disingenuous.

People have been arrested for miscarrying in the US.

I’m not, but it’s obviously an issue with text as the reader abstracts a convolution function of their current mental state onto the text they read. (There are great key and peele skits about this!). Outliers are interesting but tricky to act on.

The obvious answer is that it's not an actual issue.

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.

> I find it hard to believe this would qualify as "enough evidence" in any court of law.

It doesn't have to be enough evidence to convict alone to be enough to be a vector of substantial adverse impact.

Criminal justice involvement short of conviction can have adverse, even fatal, consequences.

you don't even need to actually seek an abortion, and it's been going on for years. There are many reports, e.g. in the BBC[1], this personal story on CNN [2], this woman who had a miscarriage while using drugs and got four years [3], this PBS article about how the risk of miscarriage being criminalized is increasing [4]... etc.

As a person outside the United States, America appears to me like a very dangerous place to be pregnant in, and what's even wilder is that people (men?) appear largely unaware of it. Regardless of whether you think it's right to convict an addict for a miscarriage or to convict a woman for seeking an abortion or for having a spontaneous one, these are all examples of the environment in which having menstrual data fall into the wrong hands could bring about significant harm. Your proposed defence reads wildly naive and woefully inadequate to me given all this.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59214544 [2] https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/23/health/south-carolina-abortio... [3] https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/577876-okl... [4] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-increasing-risk-of-cri...

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.

Safety and privacy are so closely linked for this usage to be feasible, especially with how available and identifiable anonymised data can be.

We're at a point in America where braindead corpses have to be forced to bring a baby to term https://www.today.com/health/womens-health/brain-dead-mom-fo...

So no, and take some time for self reflection.

Can you explain?

Historically, "safety" referred to protection from physical harm. It has now expanded into psychological, emotional, economical realms. This had the (very much intended) effect of redefining "unsafe" from imminent and persistent threat to anything that makes me uncomfortable.

In America, in many states, you can be imprisoned for having an abortion.

Sharing your menstrual data and therefore having it available for subpoena is quite literally a physical safety risk.

If you don't understand, or disagree that the word "safety" is entirely appropriate here, can you talk about why?

> If you don't understand, or disagree

I understand, and I do agree. I simply answered the GPs question.

Really? Intentional infliction of emotional distress goes back to the late 1800s

Not sure how that's super relevant here? "my data could be used to accuse me of a crime" is a threat of physical harm anyway, unless you define being arrested as safe.

And I don't really think public opinion has shifted on that part. You could argue about emotional comfort or something, maybe.

Being arrested by a “public safety officer” is not safe at all.

You could probably find 10 separate videos of "public safety officers" assaulting innocent people by shooting them with rubber bullets for no discernible reason or by trampling them with horses (also for no discernible reason), and that's only from the last 2 days.

Ok, antifa, but there are over 10 million arrests in the US every year. Video is not in the same league of societal influence.

When your ideologies don't stand on their own merit, one last resort is to redefine words (and hope nobody notices) in order to force people to believe what you say.

also in the 70s people would not even have "noticed" covid. back then people could not even be bothered to use seatbelts or stop chainsmoking (even in airplanes).

what is considered "acceptable risk" has completely changed in the past few decades.

There were 3 million excess deaths in the US alone from Covid, even with drastic efforts to reduce. I assure you, it would have been noticed in the 1970’s the same way the 1918 influenza pandemic was.

In 1976 there was the H1N1 outbreak which only caused 1 death and 13 hospitalizations but lead to a massive vaccination campaign for tens of millions of Americas, so yeah, they would have.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_swine_flu_outbreak

The 1968 "Hong Kong flu" had a similar case fatality rate and they certainly noticed that.

That’s also because they had much healthier weights and were on average a decade younger.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_Philadelphia_Legionnair...

1976 new illness appeared, CDC did a full investigation, identified the cause.

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