This Is the Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion
A 17-year-old girl and her mother have been charged with a series of felonies and misdemeanors after an apparent medication abortion at home in Nebraska. The state’s case relies on evidence from the teenager’s private Facebook messages, obtained directly from Facebook by court order, which show the mother and daughter allegedly bought medication online to induce abortion, and then disposed of the body of the fetus. While the court documents, obtained by Motherboard, allege that the abortion took place before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, they show in shocking detail how abortion could and will be prosecuted in the United States, and how tech companies will be enlisted by law enforcement to help prosecute their cases.....
In June, the state submitted a search warrant to Meta, Facebook's parent company, demanding all private data—including DMs—that the company had for the Burgesses. According to an affidavit submitted along with the search warrant, Ben McBride a detective with the Norfolk, Nebraska Police Division had been investigating the alleged abortion. The family told him that Celeste had unexpectedly "given birth prematurely supposedly to a stillborn child." Celeste "then enacted the help of her mother, Jessica Burgess, and the two of them buried the child together. Both of the Burgess' were telling others they needed to dig the child's body up and then burn it."
McBride's affidavit states explicitly that police exhumed the fetus. "An exact cause [of death] was unknown, but the lungs didn't indicate they'd ever contained any air." A final autopsy report "stated the cause of death was undetermined. The findings were consistent with the fetus being stillborn but the placement of the fetus into a plastic bag raise the possibility of asphyxia due to suffocation."
McBride told the court that law enforcement needed evidence from Facebook in order to determine "whether the baby was stillborn or asphyxiated."
A court approved the search warrant, and Facebook complied with it, according to other court records. The Facebook messages appear to show Celeste and Jessica talking about taking abortion medication.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7zevd/this-is-the-data-facebook-gave-police-to-prosecute-a-teenager-for-abortion