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 spokesperson Michael Aciman told WIRED that Google removes ads that violate the company’s policies around misleading information. “We know that people come to Google looking for information they can trust during deeply personal moments and are committed to ensuring advertisements on this topic are clear and easily understood,” he says.
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.
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