Tele-abortion: between privacy and women’s reproductive rights

Women’s reproductive health in general and the right to abortion in particu-lar have been targeted and challenged in recent years world-wide in a number of countries: to name a few, first the almost entire ban on abortion in Poland 2020, then the overthrow of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court of the USA in 2022. Although in international law a right to abortion has not been expressly codified in any international binding convention, regional courts have tried to recognise the existence of such right as a corollary to other human rights such as the right to privacy and the right to be free from inhuman or degrading treat-ment. To overcome such challenges, in some US States and in South America, a practice has emerged drawing from the most recent developments in e-health, which is that of tele-abortion, which would allow women in need of ending an unwanted pregnancy to access the service remotely, through the abortion pill and with the supervision of a doctor through a series of online meetings. Nonetheless, resorting to such method raises a number of legal issues, which this paper aims at analysing and examine in depth from an international law perspective. Among the issues addressed by this paper, is whether tele-abortion can be considered as a means to ensure women’s reproductive rights, which will be approached through an intersectional lens, as well as the close connection between tele-abortion and women’s right to privacy, focusing on the safeguard-ing of the collection and storage of data in case of tele-abortion. In this regard, the paper will highlight the legal vacuum in international law in terms of the developments of e-health particularly, and AI in general, fields in which the international legal framework is still lagging behind.