Big Tech shouldn’t punish women for seeking abortions

3 Feb 2025 | Americas, News and features, United States, Volume 53.04 Winter 2024

This article first appeared in Volume 53, Issue 4 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled Unsung Heroes: How musicians are raising their voices against oppression. Read more about the issue here. The issue was published on 12 December 2024.

Big technology companies have enormous and outsized power. They control what information we can share and how, and demonstrate little transparency or accountability to users about what they are doing. They are too often permitted to set their own arbitrary standards, governing what we can and can’t say on social media, and how and to whom these ever-shifting rules apply. In no area is this more evident than in the battle between those who want to seek out and criminalise women for having an abortion and those who want to protect women’s right to choose.

In recent years, technology has dramatically altered the abortion landscape for women in the USA. It is now possible to order safe and effective abortion pills online and find accurate information about how to use those pills. This represents an unprecedented and world-changing expansion of women’s privacy and freedom. Thanks to improved access to medication, far fewer women will die or be traumatised, despite the US Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to strip the country’s women of federally guaranteed abortion rights. But women’s new-found abortion freedoms are under threat from powerful people who oppose privacy, freedom and safety for women, and corporatists who put business interests above human rights.

With President Donald Trump’s re-election things may be about to become a whole lot worse.

In March 2024, eight months before the election, I attended Visions for a Digital Future: Combating Online Suppression of Abortion Information, a panel discussion hosted by a coalition of rights and safe abortion access organisations including Amnesty International USA, Plan C, the Universal Access Project and Women on Web, along with experts from Le Centre ODAS and Fòs Feminista.

The panellists warned that tech companies were already suppressing information about reproductive health, either deliberately and as a matter of policy, or accidentally, such as when posts containing legitimate medical information trigger filters meant to block other kinds of content. Remedies have been piecemeal. Some organisations have been able to get accounts reinstated after meeting with contacts at Meta, but there is no democratic and transparent way of determining who gets access to vital medical information.

In one very recent case, Meta temporarily shut down the advertising account of Plan C, a group that provides up-to-date information on how US residents access abortion pills online, days before the US election, over claims of “inauthentic behaviour”.

European lawmakers have already taken steps to bring Big Tech companies to heel. They have done so via laws like the EU’s Digital Markets Act, a 2022 law which, among other things, requires large tech companies to get users’ consent before tracking them for advertising purposes; and the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA), which went into effect earlier this year, preventing large online platforms such as Facebook, X and Instagram from arbitrarily restricting or deleting independent media content.

Despite growing pressure from large parts of civil society, the USA has yet to pass federal legislation to meaningfully regulate Big Tech. Under a Trump presidency, the federal government is likely to go one step further and ask tech companies to use the data they hold to assist state and local law enforcement in tracking, prosecuting and jailing women for seeking abortions.

Some of the president-elect’s most prominent supporters are anti-feminist tech executives like Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and an ardent foe of government regulation (of corporations); venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who has questioned the wisdom of ever allowing women to vote; and Blake Masters, failed congressional candidate and chief operations officer of Thiel Capital (Thiel’s venture capital investment firm). All three have either previously expressed personal support for at least some level of abortion restriction or given large sums of money to politicians committed to restricting it.

Knowing it was a liability for him, Trump made confusing and contradictory statements about abortion on the campaign trail: once pro-choice, he bragged about having appointed the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v Wade.

By contrast, Vice President-elect JD Vance is an open theocrat who has pressured federal regulators to rescind a Biden administration rule that prevents police from accessing the private medical records of women who cross state lines to get reproductive health care, according to investigative news outlet The Lever.

Project 2025, the 900-plus-page handbook assembled by the right- wing Heritage Foundation and drafted in part by dozens of former Trump administration officials, indicates that a second Trump administration will seek to increase federal surveillance of pregnant people nationwide. They will most likely do this partly by requiring states to report abortion data and cutting federal funding to those that don’t comply. That data could put women and health care providers in serious danger of prosecution and/ or jail time. State law enforcement officials could pressure or compel tech companies to collect and share it.

This has already happened in the USA under a Democratic administration. Facebook’s 2022 decision to comply with a Nebraska police officer’s request for private data enabled the state to try, as an adult, a 17-year-old girl facing criminal charges for ending a pregnancy. Facebook handed over private messages the girl and her mother had exchanged in which the two discussed obtaining abortion pills, according to The Guardian.

The extent of the data Facebook handed over is unclear, but it’s apparent that companies like Facebook’s parent company Meta cannot be trusted to safeguard users’ privacy. Many of the largest tech companies in the world have refused to clarify how they will handle law enforcement requests for abortion-related data. While Meta does not allow users to gift or sell pharmaceuticals on its platform, it does, in theory, allow them to share information about how to access abortion pills, although enforcement of that policy has been inconsistent and non-transparent.

One ray of hope is that there’s a small chance that Trump will retain Lina Khan, Biden’s pick for chair of the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Khan has advocated for restraining the tech industry’s power and is seen as a threat. Days before the election, Musk wrote on X that Khan “will be fired soon.” Yet Vance has defended Khan, saying in a recent television interview that “she’s been very smart about trying to go after some of these big tech companies that monopolise what we’re allowed to say in our own country.”

Best known as an anti-monopolist, Khan has brought lawsuits against data brokers trafficking in geolocation data, a crucial bulwark against efforts by anti-abortion prosecutors to obtain women’s private medical data. This is important because in 2023, 19 Republican attorneys general in states that criminalised abortion demanded access to women’s private medical records in order to determine whether they had travelled out of state for care.

Under Khan, the FTC also cracked down on companies that extracted and misused customers’ private data. Browsing and location data of the kind these companies were gathering can provide intimate details of a person’s life, from their religious and political affiliations and sexual proclivities to their private medical decisions. Companies, knowing that most people would object to having this kind of data collected and shared, often hide what they are doing or mislead users about the extent of it.

It’s not yet clear what Trump’s top priorities will be as president, or who will have his ear. On the question of Khan, it seems likelier that he’ll take his cues from an oligarch like Musk than from his own vice president. As Politico recently noted Vance will have “little agenda-setting power of his own” in the new administration. Occasional anti-Big Tech rhetoric notwithstanding, neither Trump nor Vance cares about protecting women’s privacy. If Khan is fired, it’s extremely unlikely that any member of the Trump administration will take measures to safeguard medical data. State and local authorities will have to do everything in their power to pressure or require these companies to clarify why they are suppressing abortion-related content, and push them to fight requests that violate users’ privacy in court.

Authorities should also push or force tech companies to take measures – such as not collecting certain data in the first place or making it more secure – that would make it difficult or impossible to comply with law enforcement requests designed to punish women for exercising a right recognised by most Americans and international law. Failure to do so will jeopardise women’s lives, health and freedom.

 

Silenced Afghan women raise their voices in hope

12 Sep 2024 | Afghanistan, Asia and Pacific, News and features

Everything Afghan women do this week in Tirana, Albania is forbidden to them at home. Arguing. Laughing. Speaking loudly in public. Singing. Wearing brightly coloured clothes. Showing their faces. All haram according to the men from Kandahar who currently hold power. As the Taliban move to erase women across Afghanistan, in Tirana Afghan women are asking, how do we fight back?

“Until now we have been unable to sit together and listen to each other, and understand what do we want?” said Farzana Kochi. At 26, she became one of Afghanistan’s youngest MPs, representing her nomadic Kochi people. Like most of the women at the summit she was forced to flee Afghanistan when the Taliban seized power in 2021. Now aged 33, she lives in exile in Norway.

The last time I saw her, she was taking me to meet her constituents. It was May 2021, a few weeks before the withdrawal of US troops, the collapse of the government and the return of the Taliban. She was used to Taliban death threats – we travelled in a bullet-proof car, and she had been careful not to signal her movements in advance. When we arrived at the Kochi encampment, she distributed notebooks and pens to the children, but there was no school for them to attend – neither for boys nor girls. The women remained in the tents, as the men would not let them be filmed. Women’s rights, Farzana explained, had scarcely spread beyond the city limits – her work was mainly trying to alleviate poverty. In this she had the trust of the Kochi elders. “Why wouldn’t we vote for her?” one said to me. “She’s like our daughter. And she’s the only politician who comes to visit us and see our problems.”

That day, Farzana wore a brightly coloured traditional Kochi dress. After the Taliban takeover, she sent me a picture of herself in a black niqab, with only her eyes showing – the costume she wore to escape Afghanistan after the Taliban raided her office. Now, when she calls home, all her former constituents’ problems have been magnified. They are still just as poor and no politicians or NGOs are there to help them.

“It’s worse than ever,” she said. “The first thing people say is that they want to get out, to leave Afghanistan.”

According to Farzana, the priority for the women meeting in Tirana is to unite, and not let political or ethnic divisions distract them. “No matter if I’m Pashtun, I’m Kochi, I’m Uzbek, I’m Hazara, or whatever – we are targeted as women. We are all victims of the same thing.” She hopes the summit will produce a roadmap for Afghan women to present to international governments and the UN. No-one at the summit has any illusions about how long and rocky the road. For the moment, the Taliban feel secure as their opponents bicker about whether to engage or not. But until Afghan women decide how they want to resist, inside and outside the country, nothing will change.

At the end of the week, those women who came from Afghanistan will return. An older woman, who didn’t want to reveal her identity for fear of reprisals, said she would go back to give hope to younger women, to remind them that the Taliban fell from power before and will do so again – as well as to continue helping widows and orphans. Women are establishing underground schools for girls – just like the one Farzana attended back in the 1990s when she grew up under the first Taliban government.

The exiled women will scatter across the globe.

“No matter how many years go by, I will still cry,” Farzana said, fighting back the tears. “This wound is so deep and so fresh. Wherever you are, you can just live and settle. But you have all those weights on your shoulders. A country of millions of people is not something that you can give up on.”

Watch Lindsey Hilsum’s report for Channel 4 here.

 

Bread, Work, Freedom

11 Sep 2024 | Afghanistan, Albania, Asia and Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, News and features

A summit on Afghan women’s rights is taking place in the Albanian capital Tirana this week. The gathering comes just two weeks after the Taliban’s “vice and virtue” laws banned women in Afghanistan speaking in public.

The All-Afghan Women’s Summit is in stark contrast to a United Nations meeting in Doha, Qatar at the end of June on the future of Afghanistan which excluded women at the insistence of the Taliban.

Over 100 Afghan women are taking part in the summit in Tirana, which is co-hosted by the governments of Albania and Spain and co-sponsored by the government of Switzerland.

The event is organised by Women for Afghanistan and chaired by Afghan campaigner and former politician Fawzia Koofi. The summit is designed to give a voice to Afghan women and work towards a manifesto for the future of Afghanistan.

Koofi said: “Whilst my sisters have suffered the most under the Taliban, they have also been the strongest voices standing up against oppression. This Summit will bring us together, consolidate our positions, and build unity and purpose towards a common vision for our country. We urge the international community to listen to our recommendations on a unified platform. There is simply no time to lose”.

The occasion was marked by the release of an anthem by the UK-based Aghan singer Elaha Soroor celebrating the strength and resilience of Afghan women. The song is sung to the words of a poem in Farsi based on the rallying cry of the women’s protest movement in Afghanistan: “Bread, Work, Freedom! Education, Work, Freedom!”

“This poem is an expression of a woman’s struggle for autonomy, identity, and liberation from the constraints imposed by tradition and patriarchal authority,” Soror explained. “As the poem progresses, she reclaims her power, embracing her own identity and rejecting patience as a virtue that no longer serves her.”

Index has consistently campaigned for women’s rights in Afghanistan. Since the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, the organisation has put pressure on the British government to honour its promises to Afghan journalists and women.

Three years ago, we helped organise an open letter to The Times calling on the UK government to intervene on behalf of Afghan actors, writers, musicians and film makers targeted by the Taliban. Since then, we have run a series of articles about life under the Taliban regime.

This article from February 2023 was written anonymously about one female journalist who suffered assault and starvation during her escape from Afghanistan. Thankfully, the writer concerned, Spozhmai Maani, is now safely in France, thanks to the support of Index and other international organisations. We were delighted to announce in January 2024 that Spozhmai had won our Moments of Freedom award. Others have not been so fortunate, The crackdown on journalists continues and the latest laws effectively criminalise free expression for women.

The enforced silence of Afghanistan’s women

30 Aug 2024 | Afghanistan, Asia and Pacific, News and features, Newsletters

The silencing of Afghanistan’s women is now complete.

This week, Afghanistan’s Law on the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice came into force.

Women’s voices are now considered as awrah, or intimate parts, and may only be experienced in cases of necessity. Women must refrain from raising their voices and they are forbidden from being overheard reading aloud, chanting or singing outside their homes.

The law also dictates that women’s bodies and faces must be fully covered.

“It is haram for unrelated men to look at the bodies or faces of unrelated women, and it is haram for unrelated women to look at unrelated men,” the law says.

It is the Taliban’s ultimate denial of women’s freedom of expression and is an all too predictable outcome of the withdrawal of Western troops from the country in 2021.

The law, ratified by Taliban leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, applies to all individuals living in Afghanistan including foreign residents.

Punishment for these “crimes” will be carried out by the Taliban’s Muhtaseebs or morality police who have the authority to detain individuals for up to three days on the flimsiest of evidence.

These “vice and virtue” laws also severely restrict religious practices, outline what individuals can and cannot do in their sex lives and allow the Taliban to regulate both state and private media outlets. Publishing images of living beings is now also forbidden and people are now forbidden from storing photos or videos of others on their phones.

The human rights community has been quick to denounce the new laws.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Ravina Shamdasani said the new policies were contrary to international human rights law and “completely erase women’s presence in public – silencing their voices, and depriving them of their individual autonomy, effectively attempting to render them into faceless, voiceless shadows”.

“Disempowering and rendering invisible and voiceless half the population of Afghanistan will only worsen the human rights and humanitarian crisis in the country. Rather, this is a time to bring together all the people of Afghanistan, irrespective of their gender, religion or ethnicity, to help resolve the many challenges the country faces.”

These new laws go against everything we stand for at Index on Censorship and show a complete failure of the West’s foreign policies. And it’s the women of Afghanistan who have paid the highest price.