Activists panic as police use license plate tech to look for missing woman who had abortion

Update 6/16/25: After a Texas Sheriff’s Office performed a search of over 83,000 automatic license plate reader cameras across the nation in an effort to find a woman who had a chemical abortion at home, the Illinois Secretary of State announced new measures to prevent something similar from happening in the future. However, the camera footage was used to search for the woman out of fear for her safety.

Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias instructed the camera network company, Flock Safety, to cut off access for out-of-state authorities effective immediately. Giannoulias’ office has also been in touch with the Attorney General’s office, asking that it investigate and establish an audit system with added ‘safeguards’ to ensure compliance.

A previously passed Illinois law made it illegal for out-of-state law enforcement to use ALPR cameras to track or penalize individuals seeking abortion care or to criminalize a person’s immigration status. However, the Texas Sheriff’s Office was not seeking the woman to penalize her, but out of concern for her post-abortion safety. Texas law does not allow women to be prosecuted or penalized for their abortions.

According to Sheriff Adam King, “[H]er family was worried that she was going to bleed to death, and we were trying to find her to get her to a hospital. We weren’t trying to block her from leaving the state or whatever to get an abortion. It was about her safety.”

6/3/2025: In another example of abortion advocates twisting the truth to stoke the flames of hysteria, police in Texas are being blasted for using license plate surveillance to try to find a missing woman after she had a chemical abortion. But there’s more context to the story.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• A woman’s family sought help from police in Texas after the woman took the abortion pill and then they were unable to locate her for an unspecified amount of time.

• The family reportedly feared that the woman would “bleed to death” and asked police to find her to “get her to a hospital.”

• Police utilized license plate search technology in an attempt to locate the woman’s vehicle.

• Abortion advocates are portraying the use of such surveillance as a way that women who have abortions could be tracked.

• Texas law does not allow penalties against women who obtain abortions.

• The woman was located, found to be safe, and was not charged with any crime.

THE DETAILS:

According to 404 Media, the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office performed a search of over 83,000 automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras (through a company called Flock) across the nation in an effort to find a woman who had a chemical abortion at home:

Sheriff Adam King of the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office told 404 Media in a phone call that the woman self-administered the abortion “and her family was worried that she was going to bleed to death, and we were trying to find her to get her to a hospital.”“We weren’t trying to block her from leaving the state or whatever to get an abortion,” he said. “It was about her safety.” He said the search “got a couple hits on her on Flocks in Dallas,” but Flock was not responsible for ultimately finding her. Two days later the Sheriff’s Office was able to establish contact with the woman and verify she was okay, he added.

The woman was not charged with any crime once her welfare was verified — because, after all, no woman can be charged for an abortion under Texas law — but pro-abortion extremists wasted no time leaping upon the story with visions of a dystopian police state where women are being hunted down for having abortions.

Writer Jessica Valenti warned ominously in her Abortion Every Day newsletter, “The dystopian future feminists spent years warning about is here now.”

Never mind that it was the woman’s own family who reportedly feared for her safety — perhaps because they’re aware that hemorrhaging is one of the risks of taking the abortion pill.

404 Media points out that the Flock license plate search, which is typically used to “stop carjackings or find missing people,” appears to have three options:

Cops are able to search cameras acquired in their own district, those in their state, or those in a nationwide network of Flock cameras. That single search for the woman spread across 6,809 different Flock networks, with a total of 83,345 cameras, according to the data. The officer looked for hits over a month long period, it shows.

Given that the woman seems to have been missing for at least 48 hours with her family fearing for her safety, this meant she could have traveled far outside the state of Texas, given the location of Johnson County. Therefore, if the only options for the license plate search were district, state, and nationwide, the police emphasis on time and safety could have warranted a nationwide search:

The data reviewed by 404 Media shows this was a nationwide search because evidence of the search appeared in logs held by different police departments on the other side of the country from Texas. Muckrock user Rose Terse obtained two of the sets of data from Yakima and Prosser police departments in Washington via public records requests. The same search also appears on the audit report for the Mount Prospect, Illinois Police Department.

REALITY CHECK:

But regardless of what this technology is typically used for, abortion activists are terrified at the possibility of it being used to surveil women seeking abortions. Kate Bertash of the Digital Defense Fund even blamed the pro-life movement:

“We saw the groundwork for this laid pretty early. You had anti-abortion activists doing surveillance of abortion clinics, license plates, the people driving in and out, but they would stand in the parking lot with pen and paper writing down license plates,” she added. “When you have this legacy of manual surveillance and then a large tech company offers this type of surveillance as a service, those same tactics, techniques, and customers coming from an antiabortion legacy are handed these automated tools handed on a silver platter, it’s shocking to see it but also it felt inevitable.”

And yet, what’s never mentioned is that since the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, the overwhelming majority of abortion-related violence has been directed toward the pro-life movement. Supreme Court justices have been doxxed along with their children — and there was an assassination attempt on Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Pregnancy centers providing basic, everyday necessities to women, children, and families were vandalized and even forced to temporarily close.

The imagined threats that some are inventing out of this incident with a Texas woman are just that — imagined. The threats against pro-lifers (even those just offering an open door for diapers and formula) have unfortunately been very real.

1st Trimester Abortion | The Abortion Pill | What Is Abortion?

In order to portray the actions of the woman’s family and police as unreasonable, Elizabeth Ling, senior counsel for If/When/How, an abortion group, claimed the only risk women face regarding abortion pills is not injury, but legal repercussions.

“Self-managed abortion is extremely safe. What we have found in our work and our research is that the greatest risk posed to people self-managing their abortion is state violence and criminalization. I understand wanting to keep your loved ones safe,” she said (emphasis added).

But a recent analysis found that “serious adverse events” (complications) of the abortion pill (mifepristone) occur at a rate far higher than the rate reported on the FDA’s drug label — with upwards of 11% of women experiencing such events. Another recent analysis showed that the frequently repeated claim that the abortion pill is “safer than Tylenol” is not backed by any sort of research or science. That study noted:

Not only have the comparisons between mifepristone and other drugs failed in their duty to adequately assess this impossibility, but they have also demonstrated a complete disregard for the need to communicate comprehensive and truthful safety information to patients, policymakers, jurists, and the public.

In collapsing complex safety considerations into simplistic comparisons that leverage wholly incomparable metrics, these assertions systematically violate the norms and regulations that inform evidence-based biomedical communication.

Despite this, however, they have reached both the most diffuse and influential levels of our discourse over the span of roughly two decades, buoyed by the false and dangerous perception of scientific reference and expert consensus.

THE BOTTOM LINE:

Despite the family’s concern for their loved one, it appears the abortion industry and its advocates would prefer that police do nothing. After all, they claim, the abortion pill isn’t risky — the only risk is being arrested for taking it. But this isn’t reality and it isn’t the law.