As of Friday, legal abortion has resumed in Missouri for the first time since 2022. Nonetheless, Republicans in the legislature haven’t missed a beat. This week, they introduced HB 807, a House of Horrors bill of anti-abortion state surveillance and forced birth hell. The bill would establish a state-run registry to track pregnancies, identify and monitor pregnant people “at risk for seeking an abortion,” and set up a state-run adoption marketplace to push as many people as possible to relinquish the babies they were coerced into birthing. Who would be in charge of all this? The bill tasks the creation and maintenance of these systems with so-called “contractors.”
“We’re looking at something like eHarmony for babies,” adoption attorney Gerard Harms, who worked with HB 807 sponsor state Rep. Phil Amato on the bill, told the House Children and Families Committee. “eHarmony for babies”—how normal!
Whether bills like HB 807 pass or not, they’re a reflection of what the anti-abortion movement is striving toward, just like state abortion bans introduced in the years before Dobbs. And we all know how that worked out.
Gerard Harms, author of the “Save MO Babies Act” that would create a central registry of pregnant people who are “at risk for abortion,” calls his bill “eHarmony for babies.”
Per the bill’s language, the state-run “marketplace” will operate through the state “[maintaining] a central registry of each expectant mother who is at risk for seeking an abortion of her unborn child,” which will then be “available to a prospective adoptive parent who has completed screenings.” The state will “facilitate adoptive proceedings wherein a fit and proper prospective adoptive parent adopts a child who would otherwise be aborted prior to his or her natural birth.” HB 807 also shields the “contractors” from any legal consequences for inevitably violating all kinds of privacy rights, granting them “qualified immunity from civil liability for providing such services.”
You may be wondering how the state—or, rather, its “contractors”—will determine what qualifies someone as “at risk” for an abortion and how the state will obtain this data. While that’s not answered in the bill, it’s answered by everything we already know about anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers, or CPCS, aka, the widespread, disinformation-peddling facilities that have already been surveilling pregnant people for years. CPCs exist to prey on people seeking abortion, often by posing as abortion clinics, only to then farm these individuals’ personal data, and sometimes stalk and harass them for weeks on end to pressure them against abortion. Since Dobbs, CPCs have received hundreds of millions more in state funding in states like Texas and Florida, which enforce abortion bans.
“CPCs are positioned to play a central role in surveillance of pregnant people in such a vigilante system,” the watchdog group The Alliance warned in a 2022 report detailing CPCs’ extensive surveillance strategies. “They exist, after all, to reach people experiencing unintended pregnancies, and collect extensive digital data on their clients and their reproductive histories.” Kim Clark, an attorney at the organization, told me at the time that CPCs “are basically the ultimate movement building tool of the anti-abortion movement.”
Many CPCs’ websites use a chat system called Option Line, created by the anti-abortion network Heartbeat International, for “abortion-minded” users, who are required to identify themselves and their locations. Heartbeat’s terms of use state that “all remarks” sent through Option Line can be used by the organization “for any and all purposes.” Heartbeat International’s pamphlets state, “Big data is revolutionizing all sorts of industries. Why shouldn’t it do the same for a critical ministry like ours?”
Here is the bill’s author and his contact information. You should call and email. I did.
Unfortunately, Missouri—whose former state health director in 2019 resigned after he was caught keeping a spreadsheet of Planned Parenthood patients’ menstrual cycles—isn’t quite an outlier here. In 2022, a handful of states including Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabama, and Texas, introduced legislation that would require prospective abortion seekers to be assigned a “care agent” and unique identifying number by the state, to be kept in a state-run database, with the help of crisis pregnancy centers. These bills ultimately failed because, and I hope this goes without saying, they were insane.
On the federal level, just last year, GOP Sens. Katie Britt and Marco Rubio, who’s since become our secretary of state, introduced a similar bill, called the MOMS Act. (Ha ha, get it??) Among a range of deeply disturbing measures—including establishing fetal personhood by requiring men to pay child support for fetuses—it would create an online government database called “pregnancy.gov,” and direct people with unwanted pregnancies to provide their name, zip code, and contact information to point them to a nearby CPC. The bill states that the government would then store the data collected through pregnancy.gov. Senate Democrats successfully blocked the bill last summer, but I repeat: Policy proposals like this signal the anti-abortion movement’s goals and intentions.
On top of all of this, I’d be remiss to not stress the fact that the adoption industry in the U.S. is wildly flawed, to say the least, and the state has no business forcing vulnerable pregnant people into a system that many birth mothers have described as predatory, dehumanizing and traumatic. So, there’s that, too!
