August 15, 2022

Chey was a 19-year-old college sophomore living near Orlando, Florida, when she discovered she was pregnant and decided to have an abortion. She didn’t have anyone she could ask for guidance, so she searched Google for a nearby clinic. “I wanted to find somewhere close to my partner, so I could tell him and bring him with me,” she said in a recent interview.

A Google Maps query for an abortion led her somewhere that offered the opposite: a so-called crisis pregnancy center—a type of non-medical organization with a mission to encourage women like Chey to go through with their unwanted pregnancies.

Google Maps routinely misleads people looking for abortion providers, a new analysis by Bloomberg News has found. When users type the words “abortion clinic” into the Maps search bar, crisis pregnancy centers account for about a quarter of the top 10 search results on average across all 50 US states, plus Washington D.C., according to data Bloomberg collected in July. In 13 states, including Arkansas, South Carolina and Idaho where the procedure is newly limited, five or more of the top 10 results were for CPCs, not abortion clinics.

Chey had no reason to mistrust the result; the Alphabet Inc.-owned search giant in recent years has worked to become a destination for accurate medical information. But CPCs, which are generally backed by religious groups, never provide abortions or refer patients to clinics that offer the procedure. Instead of the help she wanted, the center gave Chey a rubber fetus and a stack of pamphlets with false claims that abortions lead to mental health issues and a higher risk of breast cancer in women.

Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-google-search-abortion-clinic-crisis-pregnancy-center/