Internet privacy under siege along with abortion rights

Having witnessed how much the world seemed to change after the Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion nationwide, it has been stunning — although not too surprising — to see how much the world has tried to change back.

Written by Justice Samuel Alito, the conservative 6-3 majority opinion maintained that the right to an abortion was a part of the right to privacy — neither of which is explicitly included in the Constitution, though the right is inferred by the landmark 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut, in which Roe v. Wade is largely grounded.

You thought you had a right to privacy? Guess again.

Kicking the legs out from under the right to privacy has big and ominous implications, particularly at a time when police and other crime fighters turn increasingly to internet search engines like Google for help.

For example, privacy advocates reasonably ask, is Google doing enough to safeguard your data from falling into the wrong hands or popping up on the wrong screens? Google announced July 1 that it will delete abortion clinic visits, as well as trips to fertility clinics, domestic violence shelters and addiction treatment facilities among other sensitive locations.

One can see shades of Big Brother, author George Orwell’s symbol of a state in which every citizen is under constant surveillance. We’re not there yet but the growing number of requests from law enforcement agencies turning to Google for information on users raises big questions as to what may happen in states where abortion, or helping someone to obtain one, is a serious crime.

In the first half of last year, Google received more than 50,000 subpoenas, search warrants and other legal requests for data Google retains, according to the company.

Outside conventional law enforcement, some states are considering the bounty-hunter approach embedded in Texas’ notorious anti-abortion law.

All of which reminds me of the bad old days before Roe v. Wade, when women seldom could choose abortion unless they had a lot of money and other resources. Those days came back to me as I watched “The Janes,” a new HBO documentary about Chicago’s old Jane Collective. Volunteers, mostly women, ran the underground service from 1969 to 1973 to help pregnant women in need to obtain abortions, which were illegal in Illinois.

They constantly had to dodge police even as they advertised their services through word-of-mouth and ads in underground publications. Ironically, as Jane founder Heather Booth says in the documentary, “We always thought the police knew about it.”

She tells of a woman who was married to a policeman and brought their pregnant daughter to Jane. “Although I didn’t ask, I had every reason to believe that it was the policeman who directed his wife about where to go,” Booth says. “So we think that it actually was a service that was useful in the society.”

Jane ended after one of its sites was raided by police in 1972 and seven of its members were arrested. Fortunately, the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision was handed down in 1973 and the charges against the Jane women were dropped.

Will those days return? In some ways, they already have as politicians and activists push for even tougher laws and regulations, including efforts to seek and prosecute abortion providers as we might chase domestic terrorists.

Sanity must prevail if justice is to survive. We want law enforcement to hunt down mass shooters, domestic terrorists and other heinous criminals. But we still need to protect everyone’s reasonable right to privacy, including, I hope, the right of women to have power over their own bodies.