As a growing number of US states suppress abortion services and reproductive health information, online resources have become increasingly vital for people seeking to terminate a pregnancy. But a new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a nonprofit that tracks disinformation, claims that Google made more than $10 million over the past two years from ads for “crisis pregnancy centers,” anti-choice clinics that aim to convince women not to have abortions.
Imran Ahmed, CEO of CCDH, says that Google’s dominance and reputation as a source for trusted information make the findings even more egregious. “It’s one of the most morally offensive things I’ve seen among these companies, to build up such trust as a source of epistemic authority and then to sell it out on such a critical issue for essentially peanuts. In terms of Google’s revenues, $10 million is nothing really,” says Ahmed. “When people say ‘Google it,’ they don’t mean ‘go find lies.’”
Though crisis pregnancy centers often represent themselves as medical facilities or clinics, they are unregulated outfits whose primary goal is to steer pregnant women away from seeking abortions. According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, this can mean giving patients incorrect information about the risks of abortions or encouraging unscientific regimens, such as “abortion reversal.” Many of the tactics used by crisis pregnancy centers are aimed at delaying termination until women have passed the legal limit for accessing an abortion, thus forcing them to keep the pregnancy. Because crisis pregnancy centers, unlike medical clinics, are not regulated, they are also not bound by the data privacy and patient confidentiality laws that govern legitimate medical facilities.
Google did not respond to a request for comment.
Google remains the dominant search engine on the internet, accounting for more than 93 percent of all searches worldwide. “It’s just the plain reality that most people are getting information from Google searches because they don’t necessarily know where to turn once they find out they have a pregnancy that they wish to terminate,” says Shireen Rose Shakouri, deputy director at Reproaction, a nonprofit that seeks to increase access to abortion and reproductive health care. “It’s very unfortunate and harmful that Google is not taking this seriously and continuing to make promises and not really meeting them to clean up the disinformation that is being spread through their platforms.”
Using data from the SEO and marketing analytics tool Semrush, researchers at CCDH found that 188 crisis pregnancy centers placed ads on Google worth an estimated total of more than $10 million over two years. There was a major spike in advertising about six months before the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson ruling, which struck down the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that protected the right to abortion.
Many of the fake clinics, which are registered as 501c3 nonprofits, also take advantage of Google’s ad grants, CCDH says. The grants allow qualifying nonprofits to get up to $10,000 worth of ads per month for free.
Researchers at the CCDH also found several marketing firms catering to crisis pregnancy centers and offering services, including help accessing the Google ad grants, along with strategies to ensure that their content appears next to legitimate reproductive health information by hijacking keywords used by people seeking abortions.
“There’s a set of keywords which are clearly abortion search keywords, and those keywords tend to be the names of abortion providers,” says Callum Hood, head of research at CCDH. “Amongst the top keywords that fake clinics target, ‘planned parenthood’ is in the top five.” Planned Parenthood is a genuine reproductive health organization.
This is not the first time Google’s free advertising perks have gone to anti-abortion groups. In 2019, a group of anti-choice clinics run by a Catholic group were found to have received tens of thousands of dollars worth of free advertising on Google. In response, the company changed its policies to require such organizations to note whether they actually offer abortion services.
But the CCDH report found that sometimes these labels were still not applied to ads from crisis pregnancy centers. And even then, Shakouri says the label can be confusing to users who don’t know the difference between a crisis pregnancy center and a legitimate health clinic that may simply not provide abortion care.“There’s a lot of ways people could interpret that labeling, and that labeling has been applied to organizations like abortion funds or services that act as referral services,” she says.
This confusion extends beyond ads and search to Google Maps, where crisis pregnancy centers often show up alongside legitimate clinics.
“It’s very hard for people that are less digitally literate to find out who is a legitimate provider,” says Sanne Thijssen, the creator of #HeyGoogle, which maps crisis pregnancy centers throughout Europe to help women better identify fake clinics. “A lot of times if they see something on Google Maps … they aren’t able to really distinguish as well.”
Martha Dimitratou, media manager for PlanC, a nonprofit that provides information about access to the abortion pill, says that the organization’s Google Ads account was banned over a year ago for advertising “unauthorized pharmacies.”
“We have tried to appeal this very many times, but Google does not want to change the system,” she says.
Meanwhile, Google continues to allow ads from crisis pregnancy centers directing users to sites that promote “abortion reversal,” an unscientific method of administering progesterone to a woman who has taken abortion medication in order to stop its effects.
Angela Vasquez-Girouxat, vice president of communications and research at abortion advocacy group Naral, notes that a past study on “abortion reversal” had to be halted because the regimen posed a threat to the health of the women involved. “Imagine if there were a vaccine study that found the vaccines were harmful to people,” she says. “Google probably wouldn’t promote that as a legitimate regimen, but they allow these organizations to continue to promote abortion pill reversal and other fake science, despite the fact that it is physically dangerous.”
