For those living in United States it shouldn’t come as a surprise that your body is now everybody’s business.
And by everyone, I mean even those you meet on the streets, in the café and the nosey co-worker who barely says ‘Hi’ when you pass them.
Which means if you are having a quiet girly chat with your bestie in a coffee shop and the person next you hears the ‘p’ words, they can report you and all will be hell from there.
You can bang a 10-year jail terms for false alarm — an empty bloating disguised as pregnancy if you are a woman.
Your body is no longer your business alone. You have no privacy over your activities too. Anyone can snoop into your affairs whether you like it not.
Boundary invasion is no joke. If you think abortion law is the limit fanatic Republicans will go to control women’s privacy, you are in for a shocker. It’s 1973 all over again.
I was woken up by my friends at 2 am. She was feeling sick in her stomach, and was having severe headache, so she asked me to spend the night at her place.
I prepared ORS and gave it to her to drink. Something I usually take whenever I feel dizzy, but she immediate vomited it. I got scared and told her we should get to the hospital.
After some test, we found out she had carbon monoxide poisoning. She had noticed the dizziness the previous night but did not make anything of it.
The doctor advised her not to go back to her house until the place was disinfected. We decided to go over to my place.
On our way home, we were stopped by cops. They asked where we were going. We explained our situation.
One of them asked to see our phones. I didn’t suspect a thing. So we surrender our phones. He started scrolling through.
Next thing he asked me to unlock my private folders. The cop started scrolling through my private messages, images and videos.
My friend was still feeling dizzy so we begged him to let us go as my friend was still sick and needed proper rest.
He told us he was doing his duty. Then he asked me a question and I said I didn’t know what that meant. So he showed me an old chat from a dating app (OkCupid) I stopped using a long time ago.
I told him that was an old chat. He can look at the date. That was over eight months ago and I didn’t even know the app was still in my phone.
The message wasn’t even anything incriminating. I had used a word “laskpa” several times in the chat and he wanted to know what it meant.
I was dumbfounded. Shocked beyond words. I told him he was invading my privacy. He again said he was doing his duty. We are two women, looking suspicious. He had to check to certain we weren’t violating any laws.
How horrific!
His partner didn’t waste time with my friends phone and returned it to her. We spent an hours on police check before they finally let us go.
When I got home the first thing I did was go to my period app. Of course, he checked that too. But I have not used it in a while so there was nothing he could have seen as evidence against me.
My friend was too tired to discuss what we went through. She didn’t have any period on her phone, so she wasn’t as terrified as I was.
When I spoke with my attorney he said, legally the police had no right to inspect the content of my phone without a warrant. However, the new abortion law overrules privacy laws to an extent.
In January, a Texas woman was found guilty of self-inducing abortion. Her case was dismissed on the ground of the illegal arrest.
I thought of what would have happened to me if they had found even a hint of pregnancy on my phone.
I saw my future sitting in prison for 10-years and I froze on the spot. I’m a Black and a woman, a perfect target for white supremacist policemen. There was no saving for me if I had been found guilty.
Was that a dream? I keep thinking.
I have never felt more powerless than I did that night. If my period app had shown a late date?
Jesus!
Before I prove my innocence, I would have spent not less than $50,000 on the case. The Texas women wasn’t guilty, yet, she spent over $20,000 on bail and attorney’s fees.
And guess what?
Period apps do not protect your privacy either.
Prosecutors can use the information on your period tracker in combination of your GPS tracking across States and your bank statement to predict if you had an abortion or intend to have one.
To be on the safe side, just delete every digital menstrual tracking on your devices. You can never be too conscious. While some states are willing to protect abortion rights, others are determined to go an extreme length to see that abortion is eradicated.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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