Online search for abortion can take you to anti-abortion center. Websites take action
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Anti-abortion pregnancy resources centers in Kansas and Missouri provide counseling to people to continue pregnancies. Abortion rights advocates say they are misleading.
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The internet hasn’t been much help to people looking for abortion providers.
Last month, Bloomberg News found that Google Maps routinely misled people looking for abortion providers.
It found that when users typed the words “abortion clinic” into the Google Maps search bar, anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers accounted, on average, for about one-fourth of Top 10 search results across all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The data was collected in July.
Crisis pregnancy centers are nonprofit, typically faith-based, organizations that try to talk pregnant women out of abortion, rather than refer or provide abortions. Critics label them “fake clinics,” calling their marketing “misleading.”
In 13 states, half or more than half of the Top 10 search results for abortion clinics were pregnancy centers.
It’s been such a problem that in 2018, partly to raise the public’s awareness about crisis pregnancy centers, two researchers in the College of Public Health at the University of Georgia created a national locator map.
The Crisis Pregnancy Center Map identified 2,527 centers in the United States, more than three times the number of abortion providers in the country, which numbered about 800 at the latest count in 2017. The South and Midwest had the most.
The map currently shows 73 pregnancy centers in Missouri and 38 in Kansas. By contrast, Kansas has five abortion clinics; Missouri has none.
Bloomberg found that the misdirection had consequences. It reported the experience of a 19-year-old Florida college sophomore who used Google Maps to find an abortion clinic.
The search results led her instead to a crisis pregnancy center where she said she was given a rubber fetus and pamphlets that claimed abortion leads to mental health problems and a higher risk of breast cancer — two common assertions largely debunked by national medical organizations.
The American Psychological Association points to more than 50 years of research that shows, quite the opposite, that restricting access to safe, legal abortion causes physical and mental health problems.
Last week Google announced it would start listing verified abortion providers on Google Maps to help distinguish abortion clinics from pregnancy centers. Google is verifying the information itself. If a location can’t be verified, it will be flagged with a “might not provide abortions” label.
The Google announcement came shortly after online business directory Yelp said it, too, will begin prominently flagging listings for crisis pregnancy centers with a note that it might “provide limited medical services and may not have licensed medical professionals onsite.”
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