Abortion surveillance only incidentally involves period-trackers

It’s all your digital stuff, plus snitchy friends and doctors.

I get it. The deeper we get into this GOP christofascist Handmaid’s Tale LARP, the more it feels like we are living in a dystopian novel and the more draw on stories to understand our experience. The idea that a cyberpunk Red State sheriff — Boss Hogg meets Robocop — would use period-tracking apps for dragnet abortion surveillance is a great setup for a novel, but it’s not very reflective of reality.

I’m a novelist and I work on public policy, and the difference is that novels are very, very simplified. They tend to work in linear, verse-verse-chorus fashion, where causes beget effects in a way that is easy to understand; if a cause-effect relationship is complexified, it in service to a surprise ending or plot-twist — it’s not just par for the course.

In actual public policy fights, things are really messy. I’m not saying that we don’t live in a causal universe, but I am saying that figuring out which intervention will produce what outcome is a matter of informed guesswork and requires constant iteration and revision.

That’s not just because of the complexity of the real world, either — it’s also because real world policy fights are adversarial. Every move…