Abortions have always taken place, even when they have been illegal. But banning abortion in the age of online surveillance is something entirely new. Even though online data is anonymized, by combining a number of different data points, it’s possible for those with access to them to determine who the data belongs to. In the case of women, that can mean determining whether they’re pregnant or have had an abortion. Given that the state is both incapable and unwilling to protect online privacy – it is down to tech companies to act, limit their data collection, and protect the freedom of women, argues Nolen Gertz.

“Forced motherhood results in bringing miserable children into the world, children whose parents cannot feed them, who become victims of public assistance or ‘martyr children.’ It must be pointed out that the same society so determined to defend the rights of the fetus shows no interest in children after they are born; instead of trying to reform this scandalous institution called public assistance, society prosecutes abortionists…”

This quote may seem like it was from a tweet posted last week after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that ruled there is a constitutional right to an abortion. But this quote was actually written by Simone de Beauvoir, who died in 1986. Thanks to the Supreme Court, though it has been almost 75 years since de Beauvoir wrote these words in her classic work The Second Sex, it might feel as though nothing has changed, that her argument that “this fervor on the part of some men to reject everything that might liberate women shows how alive antifeminism is” is as true today as when she wrote it in 1949.