The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and revoke the federal constitutional right to abortion continues to have life-altering and life-threatening consequences. With more than a dozen states banning abortion, a climate of fear and confusion has loomed over health care providers, abortion funds, helpers, and anyone seeking to end their pregnancy in recent months.

Beyond exerting direct control over our bodies and our health, abortion bans and other criminal laws give prosecutors license to investigate, arrest, and prosecute people who provide necessary health care. In some instances, bans and laws can be used or misused to target patients and other people who help them get the care they need. In state legislative sessions across the nation, legislators continue to push for more ways to restrict abortion and criminalize those who provide abortion care.

The ACLU has a long history of seeking transformational change in our criminal legal system and protecting people’s reproductive freedom. In this moment of crisis, we have brought together our expertise in both areas to launch the Abortion Criminal Defense Initiative (ACDI), which I am proud to lead.

American Civil Liberties Union

Intake: Abortion Criminal Defense Initiative

If you or someone you know is seeking legal representation for a criminal investigation or prosecution related to abortion care, we're here to help.

Since long before the fall of Roe, we’ve known that the effects of restricting abortion fall disproportionately on women and people with low-incomes, people of color, young people, and other marginalized communities — communities who are also most at risk for investigation and prosecution in our criminal legal system.

As a public defender, I witnessed how our criminal legal system is weaponized to unjustly constrain the freedom, dignity, and well-being of people, especially people in these communities. I saw the devastating toll the system has taken and continues to take. The criminalization of abortion care is another way in which our criminal legal system is being wielded to control the bodies and futures of people who are disproportionately Black, Brown and low-income.

Through the ACDI, the ACLU will fight on behalf of providers, supporters, and patients who face criminal investigation and prosecution related to abortion care. They deserve a strong and zealous criminal defense. We are establishing and working alongside a network of experienced criminal defense attorneys. The doctor caught in a web of complicated abortion restrictions as they put the health of their patients first, the family member helping their loved one travel to a clinic, and the individual unjustly investigated for receiving abortion care all deserve access to a zealous defense should they face prosecution.

For years, we have challenged abortion bans across the nation and been a leader in the fight to protect and expand access to abortion care. Leveraging our deep expertise in criminal defense and advocacy for reproductive freedom, the ACLU is prepared to meet the current moment. We have a presence in every state, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico and will build a strong network of criminal defense attorneys.

As we continue to work towards a world where everyone can get the reproductive health care they need, we won’t back down from defending the rights and dignity of individuals to make decisions about their bodies and their futures.

On January 12, a tornado tore across central Alabama, including the historic city of Selma. Since then, community groups have been clearing roads and picking up the pieces from the damage. Simultaneously, the city is preparing for its annual Bridge Crossing Jubilee: a recognition of Bloody Sunday, the Selma-to-Montgomery march, and the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

As the ACLU of Alabama prepares for our annual trip to Selma to commemorate the historic bridge crossing on March 5, amidst such devastation in the city, I feel the immense tradition and history of Selma, a place where our elders accomplished so much to make voting rights possible. 58 years after the historic movement that led to the 1965 enactment of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and the legal enfranchisement of Black voters, I remain struck by the duality of what voting rights in Alabama has meant for this nation.

We’re approaching the 10th anniversary of Shelby v. Holder, which stripped the VRA of preclearance and now we await the decision of Milligan v. Merrill which could possibly strip the vehicle of accountability for voter access and representation through Section 2. By the time we reach the 60th anniversary of the Selma Bridge crossing, we may very well be commemorating something that has less power as a federal protection and can no longer ensure our access to the ballot.

What I find most challenging in these times are the attempts by state legislators in Alabama and throughout the South to further disenfranchise Black Southerners. Legislation such as HB 7 in Alabama, which prohibits state agencies, local school boards, and public institutions of higher education from promoting, endorsing, or affirming certain divisive concepts related to race, sex, and religion. This type of bill threatens to erase the history of activism and protest that made voting possible.

Additionally, states such as Mississippi are battling legislation like HB 1020, a move to take voting power, political power, and tax revenue away from the majority Black citizens of Jackson. The legislation illegally empowers Judges appointed by the Chief Justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court and prosecutors appointed by the state attorney general to oversee criminal and civil cases in Jackson.

The efforts to codify white supremacy in 2023 are not surprising. We are seeing these attempts regionally and nationwide. Still, I remain hopeful for the vision ahead and the shoulders we stand on.

The attempt to dismantle the Voting Rights Act piece-by-piece will not stop the much longer march toward justice. Our right to vote has never been solely advocated for by the courts, nor by Congress. The right to vote was fought for by the people. The fight came from communities that cared about their future. The fight came from people that didn’t accept brokenness. Our communities then, and now, understand that the fight to uphold our civil rights is a daily pursuit.

This fight beckons us to be arm-in-arm, to lean on one another, to organize with our neighbors, and to see that our future is one of hope. One where we demand equal access and resources for all.

A heated controversy over audio recording in Green Bay, Wisconsin has resurfaced an important privacy issue that we have been monitoring for years: the placement of surveillance microphones in public places. When it emerged that live microphones had been installed in public hallways as part of the security system in city hall, a number of politicians objected, including a city alderperson and members of the Wisconsin State Senate, who subsequently filed a lawsuit. City officials, meanwhile, defended the mics.

Similar deployments have come to light in the district attorney’s office in Nashville, and the city clerk’s office in East Providence, Rhode Island. The deployment of surveillance microphones in this manner needs to stop.

Audio surveillance can be significantly more intrusive than video surveillance. If you’re walking down the street talking about wild times with an old friend, the video will probably be quite boring — just two people walking down the street — but the audio could be compromising indeed.

And this kind of recording is legally problematic. Laws in all the states, as well as federal law, make it illegal to record a conversation where the recording party is not a participant — and some state laws require the permission of all participants in a conversation. This is why, even though surveillance cameras have become commonplace in American public spaces, very few of them include microphones.

Ethan Ace, an expert at the surveillance research company IPVM, told me that surveillance cameras are rarely installed with working microphones outside of special places like police interrogation rooms, and when they are, those microphones are rarely activated. In addition, the built-in mics that a minority of professional surveillance cameras include are typically inadequate for audio surveillance; where such surveillance is desired, purpose-specific microphones typically have to be installed. This is what was done in Green Bay, as well as in Nashville, where the system installer told the television station WTVF, “We don’t put audio on a camera unless they specifically ask for it.” The audio surveillance in these cities was not an afterthought.

Most state wiretapping laws only forbid recording where people have a “reasonable expectation of privacy.” Police carrying out their duties in public, for example, have tried to use these laws to stop people from recording them with their phones, but the courts have shot that down. Defenders of microphones in public places have tried to argue that because people are in a public place, they have no such reasonable expectation. It’s not entirely clear what the legal lines are here as the jurisprudence is limited. Surely, though, under any commonsense definition of the phrase, two people talking political strategy in a deserted hallway at 1:00 in the morning with nobody else around should be able to “reasonably expect” that their conversation isn’t being recorded. In Green Bay, in fact, a local TV station obtained recordings from the city hall and reported that “At the end of the hallway, we could clearly hear … personal conversations between individuals discussing medical issues.”

The purpose and intent of our wiretapping laws comes from a recognition that technology makes it possible for us to be overheard through small, often invisible devices even when no other humans are around, which has the potential for enormous disruption and abuse. Does anybody want to live in a country where we have to constantly look around us wondering whether there’s a live mic picking up what we’re saying?

Under the logic of “you have no privacy in public places,” the government could string hidden microphones throughout our national parks, and if you’re hiking through the wilderness alone with a lover or a friend, it would be totally legitimate for you to be recorded. But in a place like a city hall or district attorney’s office, sites of perpetual political, legal, and personal dramas, there are certainly more urgently private conversations than in the average public space. And there would also be more incentives in those places to eavesdrop on such conversations.

There are also significant questions about the security rationale for putting mics in public places. What, exactly, are the circumstances when audio surveillance proves important in providing security? Anybody can come up with movie-plot scenarios, but how serious are those situations, how frequently do they arise, and how crucial are audio recordings when they do? If somebody starts becoming disruptive and verbally abusive, for example, anybody present is free to take out their cellphone and start recording the situation — the ACLU has defended people’s right to do just that in numerous cases from across the country. How much does a ceiling microphone, recording 24/7 including when few people are around, really help security in such a situation?

Obviously, there are plenty of spaces in a building like a city hall where it’s legitimate for recording to take place. City council meetings or other public events are often recorded and broadcast, and such chambers often contain microphones (though even there they shouldn’t be turned on unless, through context or sign, that is obvious to everyone). Reporters interview people. But context is everything, and blanket audio surveillance is legally problematic, susceptible to abuse, and something that no rational American should want to become widespread.