Happy Nice Mall

HEATHER MOBLEY / CHARLOTTE FOR CHOICE

Although news reports at the time framed this tracking as a new tactic, it goes back decades. A 1993 article from Buffalo News He cites several accounts from clinicians and clients of abusive phone calls from anti-abortion activists that appear to be the result of license plate tracking. That same year, at a training session for activists in Florida held by the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, they were instructed to use people’s license plates to identify the names, addresses, and phone numbers of clients and clinicians. A Operations Rescue-trained volunteer standing outside a clinic in Melbourne, Florida that year told ABC News that the group used the database to “follow”. [clients and] broadcast to their home”, to make them “fully aware of what the main purpose and focus of this place is”.

There are more examples: In 1996, a Canadian police officer was charged after using police computers to track license plates of clinic clients. Abortion clinic targeted by Florida Operation Rescue in 1999 sues anti-abortion activistsclaims that they use license plate tracking to harass customers and doctors. The case was eventually dismissed the clinic’s lawyers were unable to pile up the paperwork necessary for the case to proceed. And Derenda Hancock, a clinic advocate working out of the Jackson Women’s Health “Pink House” clinic in Jackson, Mississippi (the center of the ongoing Supreme Court case and the last clinic to operate in the state), says cameras are rampant there. – there used to be a regular live broadcaster, and these footage shot outside the clinic can appear on a website dedicated to tracking doctors who provide abortions.

no where safe

Anti-abortion activists have long denied that this data is used to harass or contact people seeking an abortion; They say it’s used to monitor doctors and assess whether activism is keeping people from returning to clinics to have abortions. Rescue Operation, renamed neither Texas Right to Live nor Operation Save America, did not respond to requests for comment.

But it can certainly be used that way, and the potential of this image to target and harm people who have had abortions is exacerbated by the use of facial recognition technology, says Wessler of the ACLU. There are two possible scenarios on this front, he says: Law enforcement in states that ban abortion could use facial recognition databases to scan clinical images for residents, or private groups and organizations could use the technology themselves.

ACLU recently filed a lawsuit against facial recognition company ClearviewAI, banned it from selling its services to many businesses. But lately The New York Times reported PimEyesAn accurate and affordable facial recognition service that almost anyone can pay to use.

Texas and Oklahoma now have laws that allow private citizens to sue anyone who has or has had an abortion. In a world where federal law doesn’t protect from such lawsuits, Wessler says it’s easy to see how.Roe fine-tune the law, those who seek abortion can also be prosecuted. That possibility, coupled with clinical surveillance, can have an enormous chilling effect when you “see this nightmare of massive compensation lawsuits against people who can barely afford the gas to go to a state where they can legally have abortions.” says.

Mobley worries that if states can criminalize abortion, clinics like his will be subject to even more intense scrutiny as activists living in states that do not currently provide abortion clinics try to target the next closest locations. Visited the Jackson clinic recently. What he saw there worried him. Would Mississippi activists bring body cameras and bull horns to her?

It’s not an “if”, says Hancock; is a “when”. A protester recently made this clear to him outside the clinic: “I said, you know what, what do you do when it’s over? When we’re done here? And he literally said, ‘Well, we’re going to go to other states and shut them down. Without Roe, she says, there are no completely “safe” states for abortion access. “It only matters how long they last.”