British Police are Using Period Tracker Data and Blood Tests To Investigate Patients Who Miscarry
British Police are Using Period Tracker Data and Blood Tests To Investigate Patients Who Miscarry
This is exactly as cruel and pointless as it sounds.
Police in the United Kingdom are using data from period tracking apps and mass spectrometry tests conducted on blood, placenta, and urine to investigate patients who have had “unexplained” miscarriages.
Though abortion is legal in the UK, there are TRAP laws in place requiring certain conditions to be met first, paramount of which is that two separate doctors need to agree that the patient meets the criteria of the 1967 Abortion Act before any treatment can go ahead. Self-managed abortion is a criminal offense with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment in the UK, as is any abortion performed after the pregnancy has progressed passed 23 weeks and six days, unless the patient is at risk of serious physical harm or death, or the fetus has severe developmental anomalies.
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Hey, people who menstruate! Don't use software that leaks your period. There are clean, open source alternatives for your Android or Apple phone.
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Not a bad idea in terms of keeping sensitive information out of the hands of companies and dragnet surveillance, but probably ineffective if your threat model is local police seizing your phone (like in the article) because you had a miscarriage, and using period tracker data against you somehow.
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Shame it was written for an old ass version of Android or I'd happily switch.
E: Idk why this is getting downvoted. I can't install it from the Play Store because the app hasn't been updated. Why is that controversial? 😅
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this sounds so fucking dystopian...
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If it wasn't a UK article it'd be c/benjamingetthemusket material
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Amazing how many governments are interested in making sure babies happen - to the point of sounding alarms.
What do they know that they're not telling? Is the pollution so bad that we've wiped ourselves out biologically?
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The birth rate is dropping almost everywhere and that’s bad for capitalism
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All nations that receive the benefits of the industrial revolution, followed by increased education, medicine, resources, and stability seem to trend to a demographic transition. The net result is a stable, and usually falling, population. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition
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They know that democracy has always just been an illusion to keep us in line and that we are actually just chattel slaves for the ruling class. The system they built requires a stable or growing population when in fact it's declining, so they're taking the easy way out to boost numbers.
In the future, they'll just grow us in vats so if we get out if line, they will just murder us all and grow a new batch of slaves. Progress! 😃
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Aging populations are feared.
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They allowed a human grade extinction event and now they're got second thoughts? How... big brained monkey that sounds.
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Self abortion can kill you. British law is made to protect you from yourself. Go to the doctor and everything will be fine. And free. And without you bleeding to death in your flat.
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Self-managed abortion is a criminal offense with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment in the UK
So... the punishment for doing something dangerous is life in prison? Someone who is administering an abortion themselves is desperate and probably not aware of services available to them. They're the most vulnerable in society; someone your government should be helping and protecting.
Further, this opens every single women who has had a miscarriage up to scrutiny. I don't know if anyone has been jailed for miscarrying in the UK, but it happens in the US through similar laws, and it is tragic and barbaric.
From the article:
Although some involved women who were arrested for things such as falling down, or giving birth at home, the vast majority involved drugs, and women of colour were overrepresented.
Here's a particularly egregious example (This woman attempted to commit suicide by rat poison and survived, her baby did not).
While I agree you probably shouldn't use drugs while pregnant, obviously this won't stop someone with an addiction. It just causes further harm to marginalized people to criminalize this stuff. These laws are used to hurt the poor and the addicted, and social services are better spent preventing these sort of things instead of punitive action.
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That doesn't really seem to relate to the story at hand.
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Women's reproductive rights are a complex issue. On the one hand there's killing babies; on the other there's giving women a choice.
Tough call.
E: some of the PMs I'm getting for repeating this are absolute gold.
E2: we're all going to hell
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Soon, tampons will have wifi so they can send your data to the govt, and then they'll know you're pregnant before you even do.
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DNA matching too, to make sure you don't pollute the data.
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And the UK goverment really REALLY wants to have backdoors put into every kind on encryption.
Well, I'm sure the two aren't related.
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Sadly, I'm genuinely shocked at how many people have said things like "I got nothing to hide" when it comes to even basic intrusion of privacy by governments. It's that kind of thinking that makes authorities think such actions like this should be tolerated.
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Wait so I thought this was a thing in the US because of all the Christofascists. Does the UK also have a christofascist thing going on? Or is this just kind of an everything goes culture war bullshit thing?
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The UK is a Christian theocracy. Their legal head of state is the head of the state religion.
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The UK is more irreligious than the US.
It's true we have unelected bishops of the CoE in the Lords but they have no power and regularly get kicked in the balls for stupid suggestions.
Such as a former archbishop suggesting Sharia Law should be allowed in certain circumstances. They got roundly mocked and battered by their colleagues and the media.
They're more of a tiny, symbolic tradition that doesn't do much because they're aware of their growing irrelevance in a country with so few practicing Christians.
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Fascism is closing its jaws on the human race globally.
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Your Christo-fascists are pushing their agenda in the UK from here.
This network has been linked to major US funders of climate change denial and right-wing political causes including the Koch brothers and Robert Mercer, and to populist far-right parties in Europe, such as the Sweden Democrats and the Brothers of Italy
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The United States did not invent Christianity. They got it from Europe.
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Wow, that's not maliciously intrusive at all. Big Brother is hard at work over in jolly old fuck that noise.
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Wow, you never hear the UK mentioned as a place with abortion restrictions, but they have life in prison as a hypothetically administerable sentence for it, if done the wrong way.
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Technically abortion is illegal. There has to be a medical reason for the abortion. In practice a Doctor would consider not wanting to be pregnant would make an abortion necessary. Practice and society expectations differ from the actual law.
This would suggest no prosector would bring charges against anyone, as it wouldn't be in the public interest. So the police shouldn't wast resources on it.
There has also been a rise in abortions lately. It appears to be down to misinformation online about contraception.
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I heard a good news article on unexplained miscarriages on NPR last week.
There's a correlation between having a healthy baby and the volume of the placenta. Small placentas result in loss.
Which makes sense, the placenta is passing all the oxygen and nutrients to the baby, if it fails to size up, the baby is starved of nutrients and... well...
The doctor who invented the process to measure placental volume is getting the usual pushback from established medicine though. :(
Worth a listen if you have time:
https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/placenta-pregnancy-loss/
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Almost all miscarriages are unexplained. Because research into health issues that primarily affect women is still in the fucking dark ages.
I had a friend who suffered multiple miscarriages (including one that wouldn't complete itself and almost required surgical intervention because she was bleeding so badly - a procedure that her home state of Ohio is trying to ban now because it's the exact same procedure that is used in
electricelective abortions.After so many losses they finally figured out that her progesterone levels were extremely low and supplemented progesterone the next time she got pregnant. She now has a healthy baby boy as a result.
Medicine doesn't even have solutions for so many of these problems, and half the government wants to take away one of the few tools available to us to keep women alive and healthy.
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Ah yes, just another day of people living their best lives in the free world.
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100% nonsense if you apply some logic. British police have 0 time or budget to be investigating this. If someone stole my wallet while I was standing in front of a police officer they wouldn't be able to do a thing about it
By all means don't use software that shares your personal information with anyone but also don't waste time getting het up by this article
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Kim Jong-un liked it
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Orwell was right about that plce
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Why is everyone acting like you NEED to use an app? Paper calendars work just fine
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Simply: you shouldn't have to worry about medical data being shared with anyone without your consent, no matter if you use an app or tell your doctor.
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You probably "agreed" to it on page 27 of the user license agreement you didn't read. Along with god knows what else.
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Oh, I agree. That doesn't change reality, though. We can fight for our rights and still find a work around. In this case, by using paper that can't be tracked by the government
What bothers me is the all-or-nothing mentality people have. If something changes work around it until it can be fixed. I definitely don't mean "just give up" I mean- find alternatives until things are set right
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Some apps have a degree of machine learning that can predict next periods very well. My ex sometimes had delayed periods due to a health condition. Clue was still able to predict her dates pretty accurately. Idk if there are any open source alternatives that'll work as well.
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I have ADHD and cannot keep track of one more paper anything. I record it as something boring akin to a bank transaction now that I fear the government snooping but an app with bright blaring notifications kept me sane and only pregnant when I wanted to be for a decade. I'm mad that I don't feel safe using it any longer.
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paper calendars work ok. apps are better at collating and predicting based on past data, and therefore giving you a better idea when and what to expect and whether it's "normal".
apps can help you provide a condensed report, which helps when seeking help from a doctor. it shouldn't work that way, but at least in my anecdotal experience, the Dr who dismisses handwritten notes for 3 months, was more reasonable when it was "data collected via app".
I stopped using an app a few years ago, because of privacy issues, but there are absolutely good reasons people still use them when a calendar works.
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