Yelp will now flag listings for crisis pregnancy centers due to their ‘deceptive tactics’

The Review App Yelp announced on Tuesday that it would add flags to pregnancy centers to avoid people confusing them with abortion clinics. 

According to Fox Business, the goal of the notices is to advise consumers that crisis pregnancy centers, many of which are faith based, have only limited medical services and there is no guarantee that trained medically personnel will be onsite.

Yelp said they take transparency seriously, particularly when it comes to healthcare. “While some people come to Yelp to find businesses that offer pregnancy resources, there are others who turn to Yelp to find reliable information about abortion providers,” Yelp said in a prepared statement.

Yelp went on to say that “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.” 

Yelp also noted that for the last 4 years, they have manually evaluated business listings and altered the category of centers who don’t provide abortion services or consultations to crisis pregnancy centers. 

“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,” Noorie Malik, Yelp’s Vice President of user operations, said in an email to Axios.

“It has always felt unjust to me that there are clinics in the U.S. that provide misleading information or conduct deceptive tactics to steer pregnant people away from abortion care if that’s the path they choose to take,” Malik said.

Malik also stated that those who are seeking abortion should be given clear guidance on which centers will be able to meet their needs. “Not all consumers visiting a crisis pregnancy center’s business page may be seeking out abortion services,” Malik said, adding that Yelp would “increase efforts to better match” people who were specifically seeking abortion services with health providers that offer them and make it less likely that users will encounter crisis pregnancy centers in their search results.

Last week, many Google employees released a petition demanding that they fix misleading search results for abortion services by removing “fake abortion providers” put a stop to their business by branding them as “publishers of disinformation related to abortion services.”