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Period Tracking, Abortions, and Privacy
Our reproductive freedoms and our devices are at risk
The last few weeks have been incredibly demoralizing, draining, and upsetting — particularly if you care at all about reproductive health and reproductive justice. The tumult kicked off with Politico publishing a leaked Supreme Court majority opinion draft earlier this month to dismantle Roe vs Wade. Within days of the Politico leaked draft, new legislation in different states started being passed to further combat and whittle away reproductive rights and gender affirming care in states like Louisiana and Idaho. Louisiana, for example, is seeking to criminalize in-vitro fertilization, classify abortion as a homicide, and criminalize other forms of birth control (including IUDs). As an IUD holding native New Orleanian, I find all of this particularly terrifying.
Because of the recent events, I noticed over the past few weeks how Twitter has been ablaze with recommendations to delete period tracking apps over concerns about how data is shared/not shared, and confusion over how concerned we should be in how period trackers could be used to criminalize individuals for abortions or birth control, or if we should be concerned at all about our period trackers. As a person who has a period, is data aware, and privacy focused, who doesn’t want children now but wants…
