SURVEILLING PREGNANCY: PREDICTIVE POLICING IN A POST-ROE WORLD

Abstract

In this thesis, I examine the expansion of tech-assisted police surveillance in the United States, particularly in the post-Dobbs era, where law enforcement agencies use predictive policing software and big data to monitor criminalized abortion. Improvements in the surveillance technology available to law enforcement have resulted in an omnipresent surveillance network that erodes privacy norms in personal communications, movements, and homes. By implementing criminal abortion bans, intimate discussions once considered private now fall under law enforcement scrutiny. In our digital age, individuals generate vast amounts of data, which police use to prosecute those seeking illegal abortions. The integration of big data and predictive algorithms enables law enforcement to predict pregnancies before individuals themselves are aware, granting police unprecedented capabilities to anticipate personal medical decisions, far exceeding what the Fourth Amendment's writers envisioned. After analyzing existing law, I conclude that current legal and statutory privacy protections prove inadequate in shielding individuals from such invasive surveillance. Despite Carpenter v. United States recognizing an expectation of privacy in historical cell-site location information (CSLI) data, the Fourth Amendment offers little protection against invasive abortion surveillance post-Dobbs. To address this erosion of constitutional privacy rights, I advocate for enacting a Federal consumer data privacy law and reinterpreting the Fourth Amendment through a privacy lens.