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“It’s technological warfare,” says one.
All it takes to make fake abortion appointments is an internet connection and the will to do it /Photograph via Getty Images
Say what you want about anti-abortion activists, but you can’t accuse them of being disorganized. The recent Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade is the result of decades of planning and perseverance among politicians, lobbyists and religious institutions. And all of this strategy trickles down to the most basic levels.
The Philadelphia-area anti-abortion activists who spoke to us on condition of anonymity say there is a vast network of like-minded people who, like them, spend their free time fake dating in line for abortions, resulting in no-shows at offices offering the procedure. They do it on their lunch break, while the kids are playing video games in the next room, and sitting on the couch with the latest episode of NCIS lit in the background.
Their aim is to overwhelm an already taxed system and delay proceedings, as one put it, “to save as many lives as possible”. They hope the delays will allow people seeking abortions time to “rethink” their decisions – or that the process will become so frustrating that they will simply give up.
“They will also contact our on-call services at all hours of the night and claim that they are patients with medical emergencies,” says Sheila Ramgopal, CEO of Allegheny Reproductive Health Center in Pittsburgh, an area where patients at the Ohio are now traveling for abortions. that Ohio adopted a to forbid on most abortions. “Anything to distract us from giving people the care they need.”
“It’s a technological war”, declares an anti-abortion activist. Whether this tactic of making fake abortion appointments might be illegal remains open — and it’s not a question Ramgopal has ever investigated — but it’s certainly in violation of the terms of service. online applications, not that anyone reads them. A spokesman for Pennsylvania Attorney General (and gubernatorial candidate) Josh Shapiro said “this conduct could potentially warrant criminal charges.”
Ramgopal says that some of these fake patients are “eliminated” during the phone consultation.
“Sometimes they may start laughing or make up something that doesn’t make sense or they say something offensive to the phone staff,” Ramgopal says. But many go undetected. And even if they are discovered during the consultation, the medical staff has already lost time that could have been devoted to a real patient.
Of course, a medical facility that performs abortions also provides a range of other services, including pregnancy testing, prenatal health care, and general gynecological care, services about which both parties in the abortion debate are surely agree. So I asked one of the anti-abortion activists if she was worried that someone looking for one of these services might not get them due to an overbooked clinic thanks to their online trickery. Her response was that there are many places that offer prenatal care but do not offer abortions and said patient should go to one of these facilities instead.
The online work of anti-abortion activists extends well beyond the borders of Pennsylvania. They say they are using the same techniques to book fake abortion appointments in other states and that their counterparts in other states are targeting Pennsylvania, as well as other places in the country where abortion is still legal.
I asked one of the activists how many fake abortion appointments they could make in a day. They said “tens”. When I asked if they enter appointments manually or if they use a bot or similar tech assistance or anything that would hide their IP address, they refused to answer.
But based on my own experience trying to book appointments for the purposes of this article, dozens a day are certainly possible without the help of a bot. There are a few questions to answer and an online account to set up that includes text verifications to your phone, but I was able to book an appointment for an initial consultation and an abortion itself at two separate clinics – that’s a total of four appointments – in about 10 minutes using two Gmail accounts and one phone number. (I canceled both dates seconds after making them.)
Ramgopal says clinics are well aware that these fake abortion appointments are on the rise following the Supreme Court ruling, but adds that there is not much they can do about it. There are all sorts of online fraud prevention techniques — for example, an Airbnb property might require a renter to upload government-issued ID and provide fingerprints upon check-in — but similar hurdles could dissuade a person from making an appointment for a medical procedure as personal as an abortion.
“Our goal is to lessen barriers, not increase them,” insists Ramgopal. “Instead, you have patients traveling further and waiting longer. This is exactly what is happening everywhere. »
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