Turns Out Texas Cops Were Not Surveilling Suspected Abortion-Haver For Her Own Safety After All
Court documents show they had originally hoped to charge her with abortion.
In May of this year, a sergeant in the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office in Texas utilized a massive network of 83,000 license plate reader (LPR) cameras in order to conduct a nationwide search for a woman who had recently skipped town. The reason given? Well, on the paperwork he filed at the time, it read “had an abortion, search for female.”
Soon enough, the incident was caught and reported by 404 Media and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and cited as an example of the dangers of these kinds of surveillance systems and how they can be weaponized against those who have had abortions or are seeking abortion care, allowing law enforcement to track people to states where abortion is legal — even when doing so violates state laws that explicitly outlaw the use of LPRs to track anyone who may be seeking reproductive care, as is the case in Washington and Illinois.
However, County Sheriff Adam King and Flock, the company that owns the AI-enabled camera network, have spent the last few months swearing up and down that they were merely concerned about the woman’s safety and were investigating her as a missing person and nothing more. Certainly not as a criminal!
At the time, Sheriff King told 404 Media:
“I wanted to make sure y’all understood what that was: It wasn’t us trying to block a woman from having an abortion. It was a self-administered abortion she gave herself and her family was worried that she was going to bleed to death, and we were trying to find her to get her to a hospital. We weren’t trying to block her from leaving the state or whatever. That wasn’t the case. We just wanted to get her some medical help and that’s why we did the query on Flock.”
“The family was worried she was bleeding and needed immediate medical attention and we weren’t able to get her on the phone, they weren’t able to get her on the phone, that’s why we were checking Flock trying to find her, but it was for her safety,” he said. “That’s all it was about, her safety.”
Goodness, what an absolute mensch. What a doll! So caring and thoughtful. Surely, a friend to women, everywhere.
Or not.
New documents and court records obtained by EFF show that, initially, there was no mention of any concern for her safety and law enforcement absolutely was looking to charge her with a crime.
So here’s what actually seems to have happened. The woman’s partner called the police on May 9 to tell them that, two weeks prior, she had self-administered an abortion. He had been outside and, for some reason, walked into the bathroom to see blood and what he believed to be the non-viable fetus, which he later put in the freezer. He then assaulted her, held her at gunpoint in front of their child, and demanded she beg him for her life.
To be clear, he left that part out when he spoke to the police. The new court records are actually related to an arrest affidavit for her partner, filed after the woman went to the Sheriff’s Office to explain why she had left in the first place. So that’s how we know.
When asked why he waited so long to report this to the police, the partner said that “he had to process the event and call his family attorney.”
The police then took the Fed-Ex packaging the pills were sent in, instructions for taking medication, and pictures of the purported non-viable fetus. All the things necessary to find a missing woman about whose safety you are very concerned.
The affidavit also states that “It was discussed at the time with the District Attorney’s Office and learned the State could not statutorily charge [woman] for taking the pill to cause the abortion or miscarriage of the non-viable fetus.” Again, exactly the kind of thing you do when you are looking for a missing woman who you definitely do not want to file criminal charges against. That and citing the incident as a “death investigation” into the aborted fetus, which they also did.
You may recall from all the way up at the top of this post that the original story was that “the family” had called the Sheriff’s Office, concerned for her safety and afraid she might be bleeding out somewhere? Well, nowhere in any documents is there any family mentioned beyond the partner.
In fact, the “concerned for her safety” narrative does not appear in any documents at all until June 5, a week after the 404 Media article was published, when the officer who had conducted the search issued a “supplemental report.”
Via 404 Media:
“Deputies started to ask communication’s [sic] about looking up the victim due to a large amount of blood being found in the residence,” it states. “I never made scene on this call, just was assisting with trying to locate the victim and her children to check their welfare. I began to believe the victim may have been hurt by the [reporting person, the woman’s partner] due to the call and it not making sense […] I wanted to use resources available to help find where the victim and her children could be to make sure they were okay.”
Boy, does that ever seem like a plausible explanation!
Thankfully, it’s unlikely that Adam King will be able to float that bullshit again, as he was arrested in August by his own deputies for sexually harassing the women on his staff and then threatening to fire them for reporting it. The court has also banned him from using this kind of surveillance technology for the time being, on account of how he might use it to harass his victims.
It’s great that this time, the woman was not charged with anything, but it’s hard to trust that this will always be the case. Even knowing that something like this exists could dissuade some people from traveling to get an abortion in a state where it is legal.
Just yesterday, Texas state Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that eight people connected to a Texas midwife, whom he described as a “cabal of abortion-loving radicals,” have been arrested for practicing medicine without a license, and at least one of them with performing an illegal abortion. As much as we don’t like people practicing medicine without a license, this is the kind of thing that happens when you outlaw abortion. The midwife, Maria Margarita Rojas, is the first person to be charged in the state (in the modern era) with having performed an illegal abortion.
“Without any proof, Paxton went after Rojas, a licensed midwife dedicated to helping her pregnant patients. He heartlessly shut down several clinics that provided lawful, affordable services to families around Houston, most of whom were low-income, uninsured immigrants with few options for health care,” Jenna Hudson, a lawyer representing the group, told CNN.
It’s not just that they are going after women and health workers for things that by all rights should be legal, but that they don’t mind violating the laws of other states or arresting people on incredibly flimsy evidence in the process of doing so.
Texas: goes all out to find one woman who's had an abortion, lets 29 young girls drown in a flood.
M.I.T. Rejects a White House Offer for Special Funding Treatment
M.I.T. became the first university to reject an agreement that would trade support for the Trump administration’s higher education agenda in exchange for favorable treatment....
In a letter on Friday to the Trump administration, M.I.T.’s president, Sally Kornbluth, wrote that the university has already freely met or exceeded many of the standards outlined in the proposal, but that she disagrees with other requirements it demands, including those that would restrict free expression.
“Fundamentally, the premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone,” Dr. Kornbluth wrote."
https://archive.ph/S5S7w#selection-675.0-679.169