When 19-year-old Lisa suspected she was pregnant and wound up at a so-called "crisis pregnancy center," the anti-abortion activists did more than provide a pregnancy test: They mined her data for future use.
After getting the news of a positive result, it dawned on Lisa that she wasn't at a medical facility and she began fretting that her anonymity was at risk in the small Florida town where she lived, according to Bloomberg News.
“This information can’t go anywhere, right?” she appealed to a receptionist as she was leaving. “No one is gonna know that I was here?”
The receptionist offered only, "Well, honey, this is what happens when you have sex.”
Campaign Action
For weeks, Lisa received unwanted follow-up calls from the center seeking information about her pregnancy's progression and offering parenting classes. Lisa ultimately terminated the pregnancy through another provider.
But now, more than ever, the anecdote offers a window into how important privacy rights will increasingly become to Americans as Republicans weaponize the government. In fact, as GOP lawmakers across the country criminalize abortion, anti-abortion centers who lure people in with free pregnancy tests could simply pass along the information they gather to authorities for further inquiry.
But this cautionary tale about personal privacy from an abortion setting will be just as relevant in other areas of life. Private decisions about contraception, when and how to start a family, with whom to do it, and how to raise a family will all come into play as energized conservative extremists seek more governmental control over personal matters. The radicalized Supreme Court did much more than overturn abortion rights last week: It ushered in a new era in which privacy rights and the individual liberties that flow from them will become the primary battleground on which American democracy is won and lost.
As Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin writes:
Privacy, like liberty, is threatened by a Christian nationalist movement that wants to freeze the United States in the 19th century and remove our individual choices. The interests (the right to abortion, to same-sex marriage, to contraception, to raising your child as you see fit, to set up a household of your choosing) are varied. Some interests are as old as the republic with newfound urgency (e.g. the right to be secure in one’s home without no-knock raids), and some are entirely new (the right to control your own online data).
The theme however is singular: The right to live free from the tyranny of the government and the mob. Quite simply, privacy makes possible the “pursuit of happiness,” which each person must define for themselves.
Privacy is a 21st-century issue begging for a champion, and its political salience will only grow as radicalized conservatives flex their muscle in the coming months. In an era where companies buy and sell personal information and identity theft is a persistent worry, people today inherently understand that privacy is inextricably linked with one's personal security.
In fact, privacy is now so fundamental to personal safety that Apple—among the most successful technology companies in the world—has wrapped its corporate identity around it, dedicating an entire ad campaign to the topic.
Billboards across the San Francisco Bay Area feature models holding iPhones directly in front of their faces to shield them from view alongside the words, "Privacy. That's iPhone." (Apple also created a video version of the ad.)
The point is, privacy already matters in today's cyber-centric world. People get it. But privacy is also about to become a whole lot more important in any number of venues.
Democrats should turn the tables on Republicans and take up the mantle of shielding Americans from government interference and overreach into personal decisions. It's an issue that cuts across demographic lines with women, people of color, LGBTQ Americans—really any disenfranchised demographic—as Christian nationalists seek to impose their ‘values’ on the country.
Nothing short of liberty is at stake and now more than ever, Americans need a champion to take up their cause at the highest levels of government.
Privacy as a foundational value in a post-Roe landscape on Daily Kos' The Brief podcast
