Given that hundreds of women a year died from botched illegal abortions in the United States before Roe v. Wade, which legalized the procedure in 1973, I expected to find hospitals in Chile overflowing with dying women. Instead, I found that abortion drugs have dramatically altered the situation.
I’ve spent the past decade studying abortions in Latin American countries where abortion is always, or almost always, illegal. Yet, abortion in these countries remains commonplace. It is vastly safer than it was in the past, thanks to a revolution that has replaced back alleys with blister packs ordered online.
.. Abortifacient drugs have become so readily available in places like Chile and El Salvador that today it is impossible to enforce abortion bans. That was also the case in Ireland, where by some accounts, before last week’s legalization vote, at least two Irish women a day were self-administering abortions using pills.
.. The most widely available abortion drug in Latin America, misoprostol, is commonly used to treat ulcers. Although less effective than the combination of mifepristone and misoprostol used in the United States, misoprostol taken in the first trimester triggers an abortion in approximately 90 percent of cases.
.. Efforts to restrict access to misoprostol will fail not simply because it costs pennies to make, but also because it saves lives. The World Health Organization lists misoprostol as an “essential medicine” for treating miscarriages, and it is credited with dramatically reducing deaths from illegal abortions.
.. If a woman takes the wrong drug or the wrong dosage, particularly too late in pregnancy, she is likely to wind up in the emergency room, bleeding. There is no ready way for doctors to tell the difference between the hemorrhaging from a natural miscarriage and that from an induced abortion. But that hasn’t stopped governments from tasking them with trying.
.. Historically, as well as in most countries today, abortion prosecutions typically target the doctor. This practice is endorsed by today’s anti-abortion movement, which with virtual unanimity proclaims that women are abortion’s “second victims,” deserving compassion rather than punishment.
.. Government officials have toured the country’s hospitals to inform doctors of their duty to report women even suspected of having induced their miscarriages. Not only does this policy violate near-universal norms of patient confidentiality, but because doctors have no reliable way to tell a natural miscarriage from an abortion, reports are made on the basis of suspicion. Who do doctors tend to suspect most readily? Poor women... Doctors may suspect wealthier patients of inducing a miscarriage, but they report only poor patients. Confidentiality has become a commodity... The risk of being accused of a crime injects fear and distrust into the doctor-patient relationship, leading some women to postpone or forgo necessary care... even a substantial legal victory for abortion opponents will not be as effective in combating abortion as they imagine — not just because a woman who wants to terminate her pregnancy will find a way, but because abortion drugs make finding that way easier than ever. In the internet age, trying to stop abortion by closing clinics is like trying to eradicate pornography by seizing magazines... Doctors will find themselves torn between strong norms protecting confidentiality and the pressure to report their patients, and the pressure to treat women themselves as criminals is likely to grow,.. Abortions rates are driven not by legality but by economics. Half of the abortions in the United States are among women below the federal poverty line... the best way to lower abortion rates is to deal with what causes women to want to abort in the first place. Rather than ending abortion, criminalizing abortion will merely create new ways in which the state can intensify the misery of the poorest among us.
What Mark Zuckerberg Didn’t Say About What Facebook Knows About You
Facebook has a lot more data about us than it lets on—and its tools for providing ‘complete control’ don’t do enough
When you request and download your data from Facebook—a feature Mr. Zuckerberg repeatedly referred to in answers to questions about control—this stored browsing history isn’t there.
That is reasonable, says Antonio Garcia-Martinez, a former Facebook ad-targeting product manager and current Facebook gadfly. Facebook targets ads based on an abstraction derived from your browsing history——an abstraction such as your interest in golf. When you download your data, Facebook tells you what it thinks your interests are but doesn’t provide the specific evidence for why it thinks that.
“If you downloaded this file [of sites Facebook knows you visited], it would look like a quarter to half your browsing history,” Mr. Garcia-Martinez adds.
Another reason Facebook doesn’t give you this data: The company claims recovering it from its databases is difficult. In one case, it took Facebook 106 days to deliver to a Belgian mathematician, Paul-Olivier Dehaye, all the data the company had gathered on him through its most common tracking system. Facebook doesn’t say how long it stores this information.
When you opt out of interest-based ads, the system that uses your browsing history to target you, Facebook continues tracking you anyway. It just no longer uses the data to show you ads.
There is more data Facebook collects that it doesn’t explain. It encourages users to upload their phone contacts, including names, phone numbers and email addresses. Facebook never discloses if such personal information about you has been uploaded by other users from their contact lists, how many times that might have happened or who might have uploaded it.
.. There’s also a form of location data you can’t control unless you delete your whole account. This isn’t the app’s easy-to-turn-off GPS tracking. It’s the string of IP addresses, a form of device identification on the internet, that can show where your computer or phone is each time it connects to Facebook.
Location is a powerful signal for Facebook, allowing it to infer how you are connected to other people, even if you don’t identify them as family members, co-workers or lovers.
.. All this data, plus the elements Facebook lets you control, can potentially reveal everything from your wealth to whether you are depressed.
Facebook, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and a host of smaller companies that compete with and support the giants in the digital ad space have become addicted to the kind of information that helps microtarget ads.
Michael Cohen, ‘Ultimate Trump Loyalist,’ Now in the Sights of the F.B.I.
During the presidential campaign, Michael D. Cohen got a Google alert for a breaking story: “Russian President Vladimir Putin Praises Donald Trump as ‘Talented’ and ‘Very Colorful.’”
For most American politicians, that article in December 2015 would hardly have been welcome news. But Mr. Cohen, whose role as personal lawyer and fixer for President Trump has been firmly rooted in the transactional world of his boss, saw opportunity. He emailed an old friend who had been talking about seeking Kremlin support to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, and sent him the article.
“Now is the time,” Mr. Cohen wrote. “Call me.”
.. Mr. Trump values few things more than loyalty, but secrecy is one of them. For years, to keep the circle of people involved as small as possible, he chose to have Mr. Cohen serve as his legal attack dog from a perch inside Trump Tower in Manhattan instead of having outside counsel deal with his problems, according to two people familiar with their relationship.
.. In private, Mr. Cohen has compared himself to Tom Hagen, the smooth consigliere to the mafia family in the movie “The Godfather.”
.. The lawyer seemed to relish his reputation as Mr. Trump’s “pit bull” and embraced an aggressive — some say bullying — approach to solving problems.
.. he never got a senior administration job, which people who know him say he expected
.. Another payment that the F.B.I. is said to be investigating, for $150,000, was made by American Media Inc., the parent company of The National Enquirer.
.. Mr. Trump, who was from Queens, and the Bronx-born Mr. Pecker viewed themselves as outsiders looking in at an elitist Manhattan establishment.
.. Several people close to A.M.I. and Mr. Cohen have said that the lawyer was in regular contact with company executives during the presidential campaign, when The Enquirer regularly heralded Mr. Trump and attacked his rivals.
.. A.M.I. had shared Ms. McDougal’s allegations with Mr. Cohen, though the company said it did so only as part of efforts to corroborate her story, which it said it could not do.
.. The Times reported that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, was looking into a $150,000 donation to Mr. Trump’s charitable foundation from a Ukrainian billionaire that was solicited by Mr. Cohen during the 2016 campaign.
.. Mr. Mueller has examined Mr. Cohen’s postelection role in forwarding to the administration a Ukraine-Russia peace proposal pushed by a Ukrainian lawmaker.
.. Mr. Cohen wasted no time, arranging for Mr. Trump to sign a letter of intent for the Moscow tower deal. But the project seemed to stall in the coming months.
Rather than let it go, Mr. Cohen reached out directly to Mr. Putin’s press secretary in January 2016, asking for assistance. Later, he asserted that his effort was unsuccessful.
Publishers Haven’t Realized Just How Big a Deal GDPR is
On May 25, 2018, the new EU General Data Protection Regulation (better known as GDPR) comes into effect, and I’m quite worried about how this will impact publishers because most don’t seem to be even close to compliant.
.. What I’m not seeing, however, is any real change to the way publishers use data, the business models they have that rely on data, or any consideration as to what impact this will have on their editorial strategies.
.. What people are reacting to is not just what Facebook is doing, but how every publisher is using a very large number of 3rd party trackers, where neither the publisher or the reader has any control over what is actually happening with this data.
.. . Think about how people are using services like Snapchat, Instagram Stories, or Twitch live streaming … all services that, by default, delete what you have posted so that it can’t be turned into a privacy violation later.
.. If you then, as a publisher, just implement GDPR by taking advantage of all the exceptions or loopholes, so that you continue to load 38 trackers into your site and do it like it’s all ‘business as usual’, you will be fighting against this trend.
In other words, you become the bad guy.
.. Companies like Google and Facebook are perhaps those who have benefited the most from being able to collect data from multiple sources, so you would think that they would do everything they can to try to use every loophole GDPR has.
What we are seeing, however, is a very different outcome.
Let me just remind you of the basic principles of GDPR in a simplified way:
- Everything must be consent based.
- You can only collect what is adequate, necessary, and not excessive in relation to the specific service you offer.
- People have the right to transparency.
- People have the right to be forgotten.
- IP addresses are also considered to be personal information.
.. But think about this in relation to a new visitor. Someone that you have no prior relationship with (a first time visitor). What data can you actually collect and use for that person?
The answer is … nothing!
.. The reason is that a first time visitor hasn’t done anything that could be considered consent, so you have nothing to work with.
I don’t think publishers realize just what this means.
Essentially, it means that you can’t load any 3rd party service into your site. You can’t load advertising from your ad partners (via their scripts), you can’t add social widgets, you can’t add a quiz to your articles that is using some 3rd party service.
.. when Google looked at GDPR they basically came to the conclusion that there was no way around it without resulting in lengthy and likely very expensive legal fights. Fights that they would be attacked with in the press, that would also cause a drop in trust from their users.
So, Google has come to the same conclusion that I have, which is that they can’t do anything until you have given them consent. And, as a result, Google has now implemented a system so that when you visit them, you are presented with a box that looks like this:
.. So, Google is trying to get ahead of this by just getting rid of the problem altogether.
It’s the same with Facebook. They too are moving to a consent based baseline for how they do everything. And, they are also stopping their practice of buying personal data from data brokers.