Anti-abortion activists are collecting the data they’ll need for prosecutions post-Roe

The MIT Technology Review redacts license plate information.

News reports at the time framed this tracking as a new tactic, but it goes back decades. Several accounts from clinic staffers and clients of harassing phone calls from anti-abortion activists are mentioned in an article from the Buffalo News in 1993. The anti-abortion group Operation Rescue held a training session in Florida that taught activists how to identify clients and clinic workers by using license plates. An Operation Rescue trained volunteer told ABC News that the group used the database to follow up on clients and send literature to their home.

In 1996, a police officer in Canada was charged after using police computers to track the license plates of clinic clients. In 1999, an abortion clinic in Florida sued anti-abortion activists, accusing them of using license plate tracking to harass clients and doctors. The suit was dismissed after lawyers for the clinic failed to pile paperwork needed for the case to proceed.

Nowhere safe

Anti-abortion activists have long denied that this data is being used to harass or contact people seeking abortions; they say it is used to track doctors and assess whether the activism is stopping people from returning to the clinic to have an abortion. Neither Texas Right to Life nor Operation Rescue responded to requests for comment.

The potential for this footage to be used to target and harm people who have abortions is heightened by the use of facial recognition technology. Law enforcement agencies in abortion-banning states could use facial recognition databases to identify residents, or private groups and organizations could use the technology of their own.

The facial recognition company was banned from selling its services to many businesses by the American Civil Liberties Union. The New York Times reported on PimEyes, an affordable and accurate facial recognition service.

Private citizens in Texas and Oklahoma can now file lawsuits against anyone who helps with an abortion. In a world where federal statutes don't offer any protection from such lawsuits, it's easy to see how people could be sued for seeking abortions. There is a possibility of huge damages lawsuits being filed against people who are barely able to afford the gas to travel to a state where they can legally get an abortion.

If states are able to criminalize abortion, clinics like hers will become subject to even more intense scrutiny as activists who now live in states with no abortion-providing clinics seek to target the next nearest locations. She went to the Jackson clinic. She was worried about what she saw. Would the Mississippi activists bring their weapons to her?

That’s not an “if,” says Hancock; it’s a “when.” One protester made that clear to her outside the clinic recently: “I said, you know, so what are you doing when it’s done? When we’re done here? And he literally said, ‘Well, we’ll go to other states and get those closed down.’” Without Roe, she says, there are no completely “safe” states for abortion access. “It’s just a matter of how long they last.”