Pregnancy Surveillance
How police and prosecutors aim their states' abortion bans at pregnant women who seek health services outside their home states.
In this new era of interstate law enforcement marked by the recent Dobbs v Jackson decision by the US Supreme Court, a whole new field of investigative practices, which may as well be summed up as 'pregnancy surveillance,’ has already begun to emerge with some fanfare in so-called 'red states.'
Oklahoma's position as one of the reddest of them all, a place where a handful of vastly-outnumbered Democrats flaccidly agitate for a few mainstream liberal talking points mostly from within the education sector and a scant few seats in the State legislature, by all indications, will remain free of any substantial challenge for some time to come.
It can be regarded as a given, in other words, that once the fact of a woman's being pregnant in Oklahoma has begun to circulate online (and circulate it will, this being 2022, after all....), anything the Oklahoma District Attorneys Council may be able to find out about her will immediately begin to fill a dossier on her, with a view toward making sure she does not even entertain the notion of ending her pregnancy elsewhere, for whatever reason.
As a man, I cannot and will not speak to the rightness or wrongness of any such decision on any woman's part. This is a permanent moral conundrum of chicken versus egg which will never be solved to anyone's enduring satisfaction as to whether the rights of the unborn do and must outweigh those of pregnant women.
What I do know is that it is women and not men who have the capability of bearing children and that what any woman decides to do about it is her own private prerogative and a matter of conscience and has been throughout human history. There have always been ways to end a pregnancy, and untold numbers of women have always availed themselves of these, lawfully or otherwise.
But on questions of the rightness or wrongness of warrantless surveillance, yes, I do and will take a very particular stand. Much like the constitutional murkiness of the abortion question in the modern world, warrantless surveillance is hardly even a concept in today's terms which the framers of the Constitution had the means to debate in the late eighteenth century. I imagine that to include a Fourth Amendment to prevent official search and seizure from being 'unreasonable' (whatever that might be stretched to include or exclude as needed by lawyers ever since) and to ensure that 'no warrant shall issue but upon probable cause’, was probably regarded by the signatories as the best they could do, regarding the people's rights to be free from unrestrained government espionage targeted at the individual.
Conducting surveillance without any warrant issued by a judge has long been regarded by police and prosecutors as at least one way to gather evidence without having to first show that this evidence might later be both admissible and probative in court. The point of warrantless surveillance is not to build a case in law in order to prevail in a contested judicial proceeding but rather to catch a suspect or suspects in the act and then use whatever form of trickery or coercion is needed on them to compel them to take a plea bargain, without the fuss and bother of empaneling a jury.
A procedural shortcut, one might say.
But warrantless surveillance conducted on pregnant women represents a whole new philosophy of law-enforcement motivation: rather than to catch her in the act of terminating a pregnancy, indications thus far suggest that pregnancy surveillance will be about catching her in the intent. Or, probably as an intended side benefit, to see to it, she never even contemplates such intent because she already knows she is under continual surveillance just for being pregnant and going to her doctor in another state.
A form of preventive procedural terrorism, one might even say.
What this may come to mean regarding the entire fields of law enforcement and prosecution in the future, is where I believe the danger to the Bill of Rights is to be found.
While it is all well and good for 'crime prevention' to be a marketable political talking point, once preventing criminal action by treating whole sectors of the population as at least potential criminal suspects becomes the everyday MO of all governance, well, let's just say the Framers must be turning over in their graves already...
I regard this in an era when any personal device, from one's TV set, microwave oven, or doorbell to one's cell phone, PC, and automobile, amounts to a continuous broadcasting mechanism distributing vast amounts of data about one's life to anyone with the ability to harvest it, as already being a major topic in much need of detailed exploration, if the Bill of Rights is to survive and continue to be the law of the land, in the time of a worldwide web and an increasingly polarized American political landscape.
framersqool is an aging bachelor of no particular consequence. He is in command of more opinions than facts (but occasionally the facts, or the lack thereof) and can make a thing seem worth writing about.