Facebook turns over mother and daughter’s chat history to police resulting in abortion charges

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The 17-year-old from Nebraska and her mother are facing criminal charges, including performing an illegal abortion and concealing a dead body, after police obtained the pair's private chat history from Facebook.

Although the charges against the two women are based on established abortion law (Nebraska outlaws abortions 20 weeks post-fertilization unless the mother's life is in danger), women's health campaigner and digital privacy advocates say the case illustrates the dangers of ubiquitous digital snooping in a post-

The managing director of Fight for our Future said that Facebook and other Big Tech companies have made promises about defending access to reproductive healthcare since the reversal of the abortion law. These companies are involved in the criminalization of people who seek, facilitate, and provide abortions.

According to court and police records, police began investigating 17-year-old Celeste and her mother Jessica after getting a tip-off that they had illegally buried a stillborn child. The state of Nebraska issued a search warrant for the chat history and data of the two women after they talked about the matter on Facebook Messenger.

The Messenger chat history appears to show Celeste and Jessica discussing Celeste's use of home abortion medication. Celeste was at the start of her third trimester.

The chat history was used by police to take the computers and phones. They charged Jessica with performing an abortion 20 weeks after fertilization and Celeste with removing, concealing, or abandoning, both felonies.

The details of the case were first reported by the Lincoln Journal-Star and Forbes.

Meta said that the search warrant it received for the data was legal and that it didn't mention abortion.

The warrants concerned charges related to a criminal investigation and court documents indicate that police at the time were investigating a stillborn baby who was burned and buried, not a decision to have an abortion. Non-disclosure orders prevented us from revealing any information about the warrants. The orders are no longer in effect.

Meta seems to be trying to distance itself from the criticism that its current data collection policies can be used to prosecute women who have illegal abortions.

The company can only change this if it stops collecting the data in the first place, according to the campaign. End-to-end encryption would have been the default in Facebook Messenger for Celeste and Jessica. Police would have had to gain access to the pair's phones to read their conversations. E2EE can be accessed in Messenger but has to be manually turned on. It is on by default in the messaging service.

George of Fight for the Future said that Meta has the ability to make end-to-end encryption the default for all of its messages. Until Meta gives up surveilling private messages and starts protecting its users with end-to-end encryption, it is still complicit in the criminalization of pregnant people.

Police are likely to use a wide range of digital evidence to prosecute illegal abortions in the United States. Digital health records, search history, text messages, and phone location data can be requested by investigators.