In a new, wide-ranging interview with Time magazine, former president Donald Trump said he would be fine with states tracking people’s pregnancies in order to prosecute those who have abortions past a given state’s gestational limit. “I think they might do that,” Trump said in response to the question of whether states “should monitor women’s pregnancies so they can know if they’ve gotten an abortion after the ban.” “Again, you’ll have to speak to the individual states,” he said.
When the reporter asked whether Trump would be comfortable with states prosecuting women for having abortions — a throwback to the notorious 2016 campaign moment when he received backlash for saying women should face “some sort of punishment” for illegal abortions — he said, “It’s irrelevant whether I’m comfortable or not. It’s totally irrelevant because the states are going to make those decisions.”
The answer went viral on X, where several journalists, politicians, and influential Democrats compared the notion of pregnancy tracking to the plot of The Handmaid’s Tale. But this is not some far-fetched scenario. It’s already happened in recent years, both under the first Trump administration and in Missouri.
News of the Trump administration’s pregnancy tracking first surfaced in late 2017 when four teenage migrants sued the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) for keeping a weekly spreadsheet of information about the pregnancies of minors in its custody, including the gestational age of the fetus, whether the pregnancy arose from consensual sex, and whether each girl had requested an abortion. While a federal judge forbade the agency from trying to interfere with pregnant minors getting abortions in March 2018, Vice reported the following year that the agency continued to maintain the database despite the court order.
Later in 2019, the director of Missouri’s state health department admitted during a legal battle over the license for the state’s last remaining Planned Parenthood clinic that he had directed an investigator to compile a spreadsheet monitoring patients’ periods. The purpose of the database, according to the Kansas City Star, was to try to identify patients who’d had “failed abortions” as the state attempted to shut down abortion clinics. The subject line of the email circulated among health-department staffers, which was found through legal discovery, read, “Duplicate ITOPs [Induced Termination of Pregnancy] with last normal menses date.”
Both the Missouri and ORR revelations occurred years before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. But the threat of similar surveillance looms large post-Dobbs. Democratic state legislators in Virginia, a purple state that allows abortions up to 26 weeks and where the issue often swings elections, tried to preemptively block a pregnancy-tracking situation in 2023 by passing a bill that would ban search warrants from obtaining people’s menstrual data. Democrats were responding to a new threat flagged by privacy experts that law enforcement could seize data from period-tracking apps to prosecute women for having abortions. But Governor Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, reportedly thwarted that measure from becoming law. The same year, the Florida High School Athletic Administration’s board of directors voted to remove questions about high-school girls’ menstrual histories from a questionnaire students had to fill out in order to participate in sports after weeks of controversy about how the information could be used under Governor Ron DeSantis’s anti-abortion and anti-trans agenda.
Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers have tried to hoover up abortion data to further monitor who is getting the procedure and where even outside their jurisdiction. Indiana attorney general Todd Rokita has attemped to get out-of-state medical records of women who’ve traveled elsewhere for abortion care while pushing for in-state abortion records to be made public. Kansas’s GOP-controlled state legislature just overrode the Democratic governor’s veto of a bill that would ask detailed questions of people getting abortions, including their reasons for not wanting or being able to take care of a child. New Hampshire Republicans also approved a bill — without any public hearing — that would squeeze more data out of abortion providers there. The threat of abortion patients and doctors being prosecuted is real enough that the Biden administration has strengthened HIPAA rules specifically to protect the privacy of people trying to terminate a pregnancy.
And while it may have been unusual for a presidential candidate to explicitly give states his blessing to track people’s menstrual data, law enforcement already can and does use technology to surveil pregnant people. Investigators seized the cell phone of Latice Fisher, a Mississippi woman who had a stillbirth at home in 2017, to download her search history, which included “buy abortion pills, mifepristone online, misoprostol online,” and “buy misoprostol abortion pill online.” Fisher was then charged with murder. Purvi Patel, a 33-year-old woman who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for feticide after self-managing an abortion, also had her text messages to a friend about buying abortion pills online used against her as evidence.
Anti-abortion groups are also already using digital platforms to spy on people, “from funding and partnering with fertility apps that track people’s periods to reportedly using mobile geo-fencing technology to bombard patients at or en route to abortion clinics with targeted, anti-abortion propaganda ads,” as Jezebel’s Kylie Cheung reported back in 2021. So now that the Supreme Court has given states the green light to ban nearly all abortions — and Trump has explicitly okayed more of the pregnancy tracking we saw in Missouri and under his own administration — women can reasonably expect much broader surveillance of our reproductive systems under a second Trump term.
Time did us a favor by asking Trump such a direct, specific question about what seems like a dystopian concept, but there’s nothing hypothetical about it. Republican legislators across the country have been laying the groundwork for this kind of monitoring at a more accelerated pace since Roe was overturned. And despite signaling that he was trying to turn down the heat on the abortion issue and find some kind of palatable compromise with Democrats before the November election, Trump has now made clear that he’s content to let the chips fall where they may. Kicking abortion back to the states — where Republicans can revive Civil War–era abortion bans without exceptions and track, surveil, and throw women into jail for violating them — is about as extreme as it gets.