by Ursula Curiousa
When I was learning to read and write, my teacher gave me homework to devise my very first survey to deploy with three people. Question 1 for all of us in the class: “What is your name?” Question 2 was of my own design: “What is your favorite animal?” I was six years old. I had already written down the answer to Question 1 for my second respondent, a small-town attorney who usually humored me, when he refused to participate in my survey. “No, I’m not going to answer your questions.” I was so shocked that I remember the scene 29 years later. He smiled wryly and touched his long eyebrows.
“So you’re reading and writing now?” he asked me rhetorically. “Be careful with that. Don’t write everything down.” As a kid, I thought this behavior was bizarre. As I get older and bare-bones privacy protections get stripped away (like the recent over-turn of Roe v. Wade-based abortion protections with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision), I think I am starting to understand.
In researching for this essay, I searched the Internet for “apple watch temperature sensor murder.” It appears that the pregnancy-forcers have yet to tag anyone with murder charges using the Apple Watch 8’s body temperature sensors as evidence of pregnancy. Yes, planning around one’s menstrual cycle with an accurate prediction from body temperature of when one will be bleeding is progress, but how desirable is this sort of progress? Does it create more freedom than it crushes? Note: it claims to have the option to turn off temperature sampling. In this situation, I am a friend of Ludd.
I lament that I have to point out that tracking human ovulation in the general population is desirable for enemies of reproductive freedom. This applies to both preventing certain people from becoming pregnant and forcing certain people to bear children. Forced sterilization/birth for eugenics and the theft of children have long and disgusting histories in the United States; such vicious histories continue into the present day.
Exalted reactionaries sleep well tonight knowing that, in all likelihood, the Apple Watch 8 will soon serve as a witness of ovulation in “murder investigations” against those who lose a pregnancy (whether through miscarriage or abortion). The Dobbs anti-privacy decision sickens me deeply. Internal bleeding from a yet-to-be-aborted ectopic pregnancy ripping through one of my fallopian tubes would sicken me more than any theoretical mastication does, though.
If I become pregnant, I will get an abortion. Or I might not. How’s that for a temperature check?