Balancing the Risks and Rewards of Emergent Digital Health: A Case Study in Reproductive Crisis

Reproductive health is both in crisis, and at a crossroads, particularly in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade's overturn in America, and the rise of far right body politics globally. As a result, intimate tracking technologies also have potential to provide unprecedented access to reproductive healthcare and have been identified as a significant asset in achieving the SDGs for Gender Equality and Sexual and Reproductive Health, particularly in the aftermath of COVID-19. This can be true even as the phenomenon of digital health raises significant concerns for how personal data is leveraged as a form of surveillance, abuse, coercion, and potential prosecution.

Deborah Lupton (2012, 235)—pioneer of studies of the “quantified self”—identified over a decade ago, how “various kinds of social relations and interactions, including power relations, are created in and through surveillance technologies...[that are] part of the production of the citizen in neoliberal societies.” This becomes especially fraught, however, in the context of intimate platforms that govern and regulate the reproductive body, as family planning becomes a sub-technology of Foucauldian biopower made possible in large part through the long reach and capital of Big Pharma and the biotech industry.

This paper explores this fine line - between data privacy and medical innovation; between reproductive surveillance and reproductive justice; and between health access and health hazard. Ultimately, I argue that while reproductive data is crucial for both the advancement of medical research and the accessibility of future digital health, it must be safeguarded against data brokerage, enforcement agencies, and intimate surveillance regimes not just in America, but around the world.