Researchers at the CCDH also found several marketing companies targeting crisis pregnancy centers and offering services, including help accessing the Google advertising grants, along with strategies to ensure their content is displayed alongside legitimate reproductive health information by hijack keywords used by people looking for abortion.
“There’s a set of keywords that are clearly abortion keywords, and those keywords are mostly the names of abortion providers,” says Callum Hood, head of research at CCDH. “Of the top keywords targeted by fake clinics, ‘planned parenthood’ is in the top five.” Planned Parenthood is a true reproductive health organization.
This isn’t the first time Google’s free advertising benefits have gone to anti-abortion groups. In 2019, a Catholic group’s anti-choice clinic group was found to have received tens of thousands of dollars in free advertising on Google. In response, the company changed its policy to require such organizations to record whether they actually provide abortion services.
But the CCDH report found that sometimes these labels were still not applied to advertisements from crisis pregnancy centers. And even then, Shakouri says, the label can be confusing to users who don’t know the difference between a pregnancy crisis center and a legitimate health clinic that simply doesn’t provide abortion care. “There are many ways that people can interpret that label, and that labeling has been applied to organizations such as abortion funds or services that act as referral services,” she says.
This confusion extends beyond ads and searching Google Maps, where crisis pregnancy centers often appear next to legitimate clinics.
“It is very difficult for people who are less digitally savvy to figure out who is a legitimate provider,” says Sanne Thijssen, creator of #HeyGoogle, which maps crisis pregnancy centers across Europe to help women better identify bogus clinics . “When they see something on Google Maps, they often can’t really distinguish it.”
Martha Dimitratou, media manager for PlanC, a nonprofit organization that provides information about access to the abortion pill, says the organization’s Google Ads account was banned more than a year ago for advertising “unauthorized pharmacies.”
“We’ve tried many times to object to this, but Google doesn’t want to change the system,” she says.
Meanwhile, Google continues to allow ads from crisis pregnancy centers that direct users to sites promoting “abortion reversal,” an unscientific method of administering progesterone to a woman who has taken abortion medication to stop its effects.
Angela Vasquez-Girouxat, vice president of communications and research at abortion advocacy group Naral, notes that an earlier investigation into “abortion reversal” had to be dropped because the regime posed a threat to the health of the women involved. “Imagine if there was a vaccine study that showed the vaccines were harmful to humans,” she says. “Google probably wouldn’t promote that as a legitimate regimen, but they allow these organizations to continue promoting abortion pill reversal and other bogus science despite the fact that it’s physically dangerous.”
