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American woman sued for illegal abortion over her Facebook posts, the group responds (illustrative photo)
UNITED STATES – A teenage girl is being prosecuted by police for having an illegal abortion after private communications between her and her mother were leaked to authorities by Facebook. The meta-group is now under fire from critics, and abortion rights advocates are concerned this case is just the first in a long line.
Celeste Burgess, 17, who is on trial as an adult with her mother Jessica Burgess, is awaiting trial in Madison County District Court for violating a Nebraska state law prohibiting abortions, Forbes reports in an Aug. 8 article 20 weeks ban, four weeks past the legal date.
According to Forbes, authorities received a “tip” that Celeste had miscarried in April and secretly buried the fetus. During their investigation, a search warrant was issued to access Celeste and Jessica’s Facebook accounts. They then found messages between mother and daughter describing how Celeste had her mother perform an abortion. The mother and daughter have been accused since July of performing an illegal abortion and burning and burying the fetus.
For Facebook, abortion was not an issue in the mandate
In this story, first of all, the issue of confidentiality of data of users of the social network is discussed. Facebook responded to the controversy by claiming it responded to a legal request without knowing it was about abortion.
According to a statement from Meta spokesperson Andy Stone, “Nothing in the warrants we received from law enforcement in early June ahead of the Supreme Court ruling. [le 24 juin, Ndlr]He didn’t talk about an abortion.” “The warrants were for charges related to a criminal investigation, and court documents indicate that at the time, police were investigating the case of a stillborn baby who was cremated and buried, and no decision to abortion,” says the company that issued it was previously subject to a duty of confidentiality, which has since been lifted.
Much of the reporting of Meta’s role in a criminal case against a mother and daughter in Nebraska is simply false… https://t.co/gIoBPXdWH4
— Meta Newsroom (@MetaNewsroom)
It’s one of the first cases in which a person’s Facebook activity has been used to incriminate them in a state with restricted access to abortion since the ultra-conservative US Supreme Court buried a June 24 ruling that nearly passed a half a century guaranteed the right of American women to have an abortion. This decision does not make abortion illegal, but returns the United States to the situation before the emblematic Roe v. Wade” in 1973, when each state was free to approve or not. In Nebraska, in this case, abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy is prohibited.
Google deletes its data on specialist visits
As a reminder, most Facebook user information is stored on servers accessible to the company. Nevertheless, since 2016 it has been possible to benefit from the encryption of messages.
If Meta is singled out for its position on the subject, Google has acted very quickly: the Californian group announced on July 1, a week after the Supreme Court decision, that users’ location data when they visit a clinic specializing in abortion will be automatically to be deleted .
“If our systems determine that an individual has visited a (sensitive) facility, we will delete those entries from Site History shortly after their visit,” Jen Fitzpatrick, vice president of the California group, said in a statement.
See also on The HuffPost: Abortion in the United States: A 12-Year-Old Girl’s Outrage at a Public Hearing
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