By Esther Kim
TAIPEI — Ghost Island Media, a Taiwan podcast network, co-organized an event with ReproUncensored about abortion access and internet freedom, coinciding with RightsCon, a major four-day summit on human rights.
Held on the second floor of Red Room Rendezvous, an Aussie-owned bar and eatery, seats filled until nearly over 60 attendees, local and international, squeezed into the narrow space, which quickly became a standing room only. A table of vegan nibbles was on offer. Attendees sipped on free beers while listening to the panelists, some through interpreting devices. The interpreter spoke rapid-fire Mandarin simultaneously with the panelists, who all spoke in English.
It was the evening after a long day of RightsCon at the Taipei International Convention Center, located near the once-tallest building in the world, Taipei 101. (That same morning, Meredith Whittaker, president of Signal, the end-to-end encrypted messaging app, delivered a talk.) Altogether the attendees of Red Room Rendezvous represented 19 different countries. A few parliamentary members were present — one had written the legislation that recognized same-sex marriage in Taiwan — as pointed out by Ghost Island co-founder and moderator Emily Wu, to the audience's cheers.
The evening's topic, “Abortion Access and Internet Freedom,” sounds as odd a mix as peanut butter and apples. Yet, as the evening went on, it became clear that this was a pressing issue.
Eight female and nonbinary panelists, representing different backgrounds from Taiwan, Cambodia, India, the Netherlands and the United States, spoke on how access to reliable, accurate and fact-based information about abortions is being censored online both by Big Tech (Google, Meta/Facebook and Instagram) and governments even before the high-profile U.S. Supreme Court decided to roll back Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Despite advanced medical technologies that mean chemical abortions are a fairly safe, cost-effective and painless procedure today, birth control and population control are forever the concerns of nations. Therefore, governments restrict access to reliable information about sexual and reproductive health rights, especially how and where to access abortion pills.
Not only were websites that provide information on abortion pills like Plan C and Women on Web constantly blocked, they were banned from advertising on Google, ranked lower on Google search results and regularly shadow banned, leading to their sites being hidden or suspended on social media platforms.
In contrast, their ideological rivals, “crisis pregnancy centers” could advertise freely on Google and target anyone who might be pregnant. Crisis pregnancy centers mimic real abortion clinics, down to the same paint colors and fonts, and are proliferating worldwide, said Rhian Farnworth of Share-Net International, which was working on a project to map them.
Media organizations from the Netherlands and India said that "online civic space is shrinking." From threats posed by faith-based organizations to Big Tech’s rejection of ads, users' access to accurate and reliable information about comprehensive sexual health and abortion rights via the internet is limited. However, the internet remains the top source of information for the younger generation to learn about sexual health.
Korea, which only decriminalized abortion in 2021, still restricts information about safe abortions. Digital strategist Martha Dimitratou exclaimed, “Our website in South Korea was blocked three times!” With an air of resigned determination, she smiled, “Well, I guess we’ll just create our website again.” Abortions are still uninsured in Korea, and advocacy groups like Moimnet are currently appealing for the Korean government to unblock Women on Web’s website.
In the U.S., the fight is with Big Tech. Instead of checking the physical body, which keeps little to no evidence of chemical abortions, said Kate Bertash of Digital Defense Fund, “police search your digital body.” They might find receipts for abortion pills in emails, check your Google search history and request Meta (Facebook) to hand over your messages between friends or parents. She noted that most times, people who turn in those who’ve had abortions, are people who know them. Doctors, social workers or nurses who assume incorrectly that they must turn someone in to the police for miscarriages or abortions.
In Cambodia and Taiwan where abortion is legal, the fight is to educate the public, rather than directly wrestle with Big Tech. In Cambodia, pills are widely available and sold at pharmacies, walk-in, without a doctor’s prescription. This is not common knowledge. Women First Digital’s web presence provided guidance on the instructions, effects and side effects of the abortion pills, Catherine Harry of Women First Digital said.
Harry noted online censorship was also less of an issue in Cambodia because the current large language models, or artificial intelligence (AI), are untrained in Khmer. AI cannot detect the Khmer word for “vagina,” for example. Among the dozens of languages Women First Digital published, “Portuguese ads are the most restricted,” she noted.
In Taiwan, a sense of complacency has set in, professor Rita Jhang said. “Forty-one percent of legislators are female. One female president.” There was a sense Taiwan had achieved gender equality. What was left? However, education remains crucial. There is a huge gap in medical information about sexual and reproductive health in the general population.
Gradually some themes emerged: Funding for reproductive health access is declining worldwide. The Netherlands’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs is one of the major funders for reproductive rights, and they have cut funding recently, Farnworth added.
When nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) all apply for the same shrinking pool of funding, this creates a competition that pits them against each other despite sharing the same mission, Dimitratou observed.
Given that Christian organizations get “tons of money from Google,” are permitted to rank higher on the search results page and can advertise on Google, abortion rights NGOs simply cannot win by outspending. The Christian right or "pro-life" movement is extremely well-funded worldwide, virtually all panelists noted. Their crisis pregnancy centers offer free, walk-in ultrasounds in their attempts to sway the decisions of pregnant people.
Harry also noted one salient argument touted in Cambodia: “I heard one man argue that women must give birth, so the neighboring countries cannot invade us.” She concluded that men who think such just see women as baby-making machines that make soldiers and workers.
I appreciated that the panelists and organizers skipped straight to the fight around access to reliable medical information. The future is determined by uteruses, so the politicians’ fierce debate over the technicalities of gestation can be quite confusing.
My main takeaway was this: Take up space. The internet remains an important space with pockets of civic action. It’s worth fighting Big Tech and the government, placing external pressure on the companies and courts, and identifying staff allies internally so that they eventually change their policies with their products and laws. Just like women have been instructed to make ourselves small and accommodating, this is another space, the digital one, where we should not be harassed, threatened or bullied into leaving. In all, the panel was invigorating. In this brawl between camps, it’s a race against time to convert or to provide emergency aid to individuals who face a nine-month deadline.
Esther Kim is a writer from New York living in Taiwan. She is working on her first book.
English (United States) ·