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.
Hey, people who menstruate! Don’t use software that leaks your period. There are clean, open source alternatives for your Android or Apple phone.
A Data protective App funded by the German government. Take that, Brits!
As if we needed more to be depressed about, what a mess our country now is. I can see why people immigrate.
Emigrate, maybe?
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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.
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? 😅
Maybe their GitLab has the latest version? Sometimes open source apps will release first on their own repo before it gets pushed to external app repos.
I’ve always been a bit wary of apps which haven’t been released to the app store (maybe I’m overly paranoid!), so I’m just gonna stick with my crappy spreadsheet for now instead, until it gets updated. Appreciate the suggestion though :)
Or just use a piece of paper
When you use it once a month for decades, that paper starts to get either full or lost.
Use a paper journal then.
Still doesn’t help much if you lose it, I’m guessing you don’t menstruate? Plus, apps do the prediction for you so you don’t need to count days to figure out whether your symptoms are hormonal or physical or whether you’re late or not, etc.
So in other words you’re trying to make excuses for doing something you know you’re not supposed to be doing because you refuse to let yourself be inconvenienced in the name of doing what’s right or even basic self-interest.
Entirely unsurprising.
Uh, why exactly am I not supposed to be tracking my period? Are you really trying to mansplain how to deal with menstruation?
There are ways of safely recording data that don’t involve pens and paper, believe it or not.
-Maybe if you take a second away from furiously mashing that downvote button and have a think about things, you’ll realise you’re being a little bit silly.
Use a paper journal and do the math yourself. There is no safe way to do it electronically anymore.
Either tolerate the inconvenience or suffer the consequences. The choice is yours. 🤷
this sounds so fucking dystopian…
If it wasn’t a UK article it’d be c/benjamingetthemusket material
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?
The birth rate is dropping almost everywhere and that’s bad for capitalism
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
They talk about this as if it’s mysterious. Not actually the fact that the working world is still based on one parent works and the other stays at home (offering their life in sacrifice to the system and providing the next generation for free, but I digress) but both parents HAVE to work to survive because the cost of living is through the roof. Child care costs too much, almost entirely wiping out one parents wage. And they could choose to offer incentives or address the reasons for the low birth rate, they know the reasons. But no, fear, criminalisation, those work better, as tools, to keep the chattel in line.
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! 😃
Aging populations are feared.
They allowed a human grade extinction event and now they’re got second thoughts? How… big brained monkey that sounds.
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.
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.
Christ, this makes me sick.
There’s no point looking at the US for examples. UK is a different country and works differently. You are reminding me of some pro guns Americans, who say that since guns are banned in the UK (they are not, they are controlled) we have stabbings all day long, while in reality there are more stabbings per capita in the US. Or another common example of Americans thinking that self defence is illegal here and if you kill a burglar you’ll go to jail. While in reality there will be a proper hearing in the court and you’ll walk free because you were using reasonable force to protect yourself and your family.
A lot of systems are crumbling in the UK due to Tory mismanagement, but the courts are still working as intended and do protect people, sometimes even from themselves.
That doesn’t really seem to relate to the story at hand.
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
I personally prefer killing babies, it is more eco friendly.
I love how my joke went down as well as a foetus down the toilet
Fetuses are not babies.
Yeah, it’s a very old joke so doesn’t really make sense.
Much like women’s rights.
The 20th century called, it wants its jokes back.
Talk to the hand!
(Ok I’ll stop now I promise)
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“Killing babies”… how ignorant that sounds.
Maybe you should tell that to the comedian who wrote the joke 30 years ago
Oh. Okay. Sure. Good head’s up.
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.
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.
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.
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?
The UK is a Christian theocracy. Their legal head of state is the head of the state religion.
Also I’ve I’m not mistaken UK lore dictates that the king/queen derives their power directly from God or something.
Lol I love the idea that the monarchy is just a group of LARPers that have made up lore about themselves as a backstory.
That’s exactly what they are. Royalty made up the idea of divine right and then let the church in on the deal to provide legitimacy to it.
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.
If you think Charles came up with any of this, you give him far more credit than His Royal Imbecility deserves.
I don’t think he came up with that but the Church of England has seats in the houses due to the head of state being the leader of the church.
Fascism is closing its jaws on the human race globally.
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
The United States did not invent Christianity. They got it from Europe.
Wow, that’s not maliciously intrusive at all. Big Brother is hard at work over in jolly old fuck that noise.
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.
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.
They should really get the de facto law written up officially, then.
Yes, but it costs political capital for very little gain. People won’t see it as a pro-abortion move. But anti-abortion people will see it as a pro-abortion move.
The UK doesn’t have the same public debate about abortion as we see in the USA. However, there is a quiet contingent of anti-abortion politicians.
The conservatives won’t move against them. The Tory strategy has been to embrace all positions to the right of them that get any steam. It’s seen them move from being the party bring the UK into the EU to leaving it. Being responsible for the the creation of the ECHR to calling for its end. If the Tories made this change in legislation they would anger the the right of their party. This would cause them to flip position back to where we are now. The total result would have them lose moderate votes that would no longer trust them with women’s health care.
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But my cage is so comfy and I’ve just got everything the way I like it.
Seriously though, I am too scared of jail to fight back
And if you make me scared, I’ll call you “paranoid” so I won’t have to think about it.
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How do you suggest we start?
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How would we address the prisoner’s dilemma of the first person getting shot?
Give up, these types never have any sort of thought to organization, they want to see tmstuff happen, but refuse to apply any effort or thought themselves.
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I don’t have to have a solution to see a problem .
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I want a revolution that can succeed because it has a social structure of some kind. Not one that will just kill off our most altruistic allies by unilaterally hurling our bodies at armed thugs.
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I don’t know. Why do you ask?
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/
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.
Electric abortions?
*elective 🤦
Lol it’s okay fam, it happens to the best of us
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It’s called data poisoning. I run AdNauseum and TrackMeNot which both do something similar but I’m shocked at the lack of data poisoning software development.
Hiding your data can be hard but filling your profile with junk is trivial by comparison.
Data poisoning is part of my moral system. If a company asks me a personal question, I give them a slightly incorrect answer
I’ve been doing it since I started using the Internet, and it pays off. My information is all scrambled… It’s still out there since it’s all been leaked, but it’s enough to make it hard to process my info
I suspect there is plenty of data poisoning software development. However, most of it is private development for use in the lucrative business of click farming.
The World Federation of Advertisers estimates that ad fraud (which is data poisoning with extra steps) accounts for 10-30% of clicks, globally.
I guess the question is why isn’t there more public development? Why doesn’t EFF add this to privacy badger?
I am a CIS male and run the Flo app just to mess with their stats and tracking. You wouldn’t believe how often my period is off!
I’ve never used an app to track, but as a teen my periods were so inconsistent that they would probably think I was pregnant and miscarrying every 3 months. There were times I didn’t bleed for 3 months then bled for 2, for years. This led me to starting birth control years before I ever had sex for the first time. I definitely would have been on some watchlist if that took place today.
Luckily, after years of trying to stop birth control (and going right back into that weird bleeding cycle every time! >:[ wtf body) my new doctor agreed to do a hysterectomy! It was just recently done, so I’m still recovering, but I’m so fucking happy I never have to deal with periods and bc pills ever again!
Sorry for the novel lol
Congratulations! I’m wicked happy for you, Internet Stranger :) and hope you a smooth recovery.
Same! I had a pregnancy scare a few weeks ago, but I’m back on my period again with my nonexistent uterus. Phew.
I bled 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and 21st of October. I plan on doing it backwards this month. My cup and non-existent uterus runneth over. I’m thinking of having a pregnancy scare next month sometime, just in time for the holidays.
In the civilized world it’s not even illegal to lie to the police (as a defendant).
Ah yes, just another day of people living their best lives in the free world.
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
Orwell was right about that plce
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