Bullying pregnancy resource centers has become something of a national pro-abortion sport since the overturn of Roe v. Wade. While crowd-sourced review company Yelp entered the fray years ago, it recently announced that it’s ratcheting up its partisan attacks by deliberately flagging all pregnancy resource center listings with a consumer notice warning.
On August 23, Yelp issued a press release reading, in part:
[T]oday, we’re introducing a new notification on Yelp business pages for Crisis Pregnancy Centers and Faith-based Crisis Pregnancy Centers that informs consumers these businesses typically offer limited medical services. In addition, we’re expanding our manual recategorization effort for those businesses.
Yelp fails to point out that, as previously noted by Live Action News, “abortion facilities are not required to refer women to adoption agencies, PRCs, or advertise which services they don’t provide.” And while Yelp finds fault with PRCs for providing “limited medical services,” in fact PRCS offer the specific medical services like ultrasounds and STI testing that make sense for their specific clientele. Increasingly, PRCs are opting for medical licensure and offering prenatal care, and many pro-life, pro-women’s health centers are offering full spectrum healthcare across the female reproductive lifespan.
In response to Yelp’s announcement, Susan B. Anthony List’s Marjorie Dannenfelser commented, “ Discriminatory labels are not meant to inform, but to scare women away from receiving the support and resources they need. America’s pregnancy centers exist to serve women and families, taking financial pressures and other types of coercion out of the equation…. If Big Tech’s labels were truthful, they’d highlight all the real services pregnancy centers provide that Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry don’t, such as diapers, formula, clothing, strollers, parenting and childbirth classes, education and career help, and much more – typically free of charge.”
Yelp: Full-throated abortion advocacy since 2018
Yelp is unapologetic and transparent about its abortion advocacy, noting “Yelp has a consistent track record of supporting access to reproductive healthcare for our employees, underserved communities and our users.” Its similarly straightforward about its concerted targeting of pregnancy resource center listings, claiming, “Since 2018, Yelp’s moderators have manually evaluated tens of thousands of business listings and recategorized businesses that do not offer actual abortion services as either Crisis Pregnancy Centers or Faith-based Crisis Pregnancy Centers.”
Furthermore, the press release read, “Our moderators conduct thorough investigations by scouring businesses’ websites, social media pages, ‘About the Business’ information contributed to Yelp by the businesses themselves, Yelp reviews from consumers, and more.” Yelp further boasted, “in 2022 alone, we have proactively evaluated nearly 33,500 U.S. business pages and recategorized nearly 470 business pages as Crisis Pregnancy Centers or Faith-based Crisis Pregnancy Centers (as of August 8, 2022).”
In an interview with Axios, Yelp’s VP of user operations Noorie Malik called “unjust” pregnancy resource centers’ efforts to share the truth about the reality of abortion and to educate women on the existence of resources and support to parent or make an adoption plan. Malik stated,““After learning about the misleading nature of crisis pregnancy centers back in 2018, I’m grateful Yelp stands behind these efforts to provide consumers with access to reliable information about reproductive health services.”
‘Proof’ of PRCs’ scientific misinformation was provided by abortion supporters
Yelp frames its actions as a simple matter of “better matching [viewers] with reproductive health services that actually offer abortions when they are searching for abortion services and making it less likely they will see crisis pregnancy centers that don’t.”
But it later strays from its ‘just the facts, ma’am’ approach, asserting, “It’s well-reported that crisis pregnancy centers do not offer abortion services, and it’s been shown that many provide misleading information in an attempt to steer people seeking abortion care to other options.”
The link purporting to show that pregnancy resource centers offer misleading information is a 2019 editorial in the Journal of General Internal Medicine co-authored by an openly pro-abortion professor at the University of Pittsburgh (which has come under fire for alleged illegal fetal tissue research), a senior attorney for the Women’s Law Project who received a national award from the National Abortion Federation, and a University of California-San Francisco researcher who believes that family medicine doctors have a “responsibility” to provide the abortion pill. The 2019 editorial trots out the same tired old tropes that abortion supporters have used for years about PRCs’ supposed deceptive scientific misinformation, insisting that any connections between abortion and breast cancer, miscarriage risk, mental health risks, and possible future infertility “have been discredited by research.”
READ: Yelp uses heavily biased sources to support its targeting of pregnancy resource centers
Where are the consumer notices for dangerous abortion facilities?
Would that Yelp’s self-proclaimed commitment to the “trust and safety of our community” and its “efforts to protect our users and provide them with access to the information they’re looking for” extended to the women injured by botched abortions.
Certainly, women would be well served by a consumer notice identifying abortion businesses that have had 911 calls placed for patient injuries (verifiable through Freedom of Information Act requests), failed their health and safety inspections, and/or operate without licenses.
In its crusade against misinformation, Yelp fails to acknowledge the documented misinformation provided to patient by abortion providers, such as New York abortion facility Early Options, which actually tells women that an induced abortion “brings down a missed period.”
Pregnancy resource centers continually subjected to physical and verbal attacks
Physical acts of vandalism including arson have been occurring across the country, yet have largely been met with predictable silence from politicians and the media who conveniently ignore the hundreds of millions of dollars in material items like diapers and cribs, housing assistance and other support given free of charge each year by pregnancy resource centers to moms in crisis.
Such hypocrisy is difficult to understand given that pro-lifers are routinely accused of failing to help women and told that they need to do more if they want abortion to be illegal and unthinkable.
Yet lawmakers and pundits decry the very pregnancy resource centers offering the tangible assistance that pro-lifers are supposedly responsible for providing.
Yelp is one company among many censoring the pro-life perspective
Yelp’s policy change comes on the heels of Google employees sending a demand letter to executives calling for the immediate removal of “misleading search results related to abortion services by removing results for fake abortion providers,” presumably referring to pregnancy resource center listings, even though such centers do not claim to provide abortions on their websites.
On August 4, Live Action News reported that Live Action founder Lila Rose’s TikTok account had been blocked, and Live Action had been banned from advertising on the platform. TikTok’s bans are just the latest online censorship against Live Action, following previous actions by Facebook (now Meta), Pinterest, Twitter, and YouTube.
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