Yelp will start flagging listings for crisis pregnancy centers in order to distinguish them from abortion clinics.
Starting on Tuesday, Yelp will place a consumer notice on crisis pregnancy centers informing users that the centers “provide limited medical services and may not have licensed medical professionals onsite,” the company revealed to Axios.
Yelp’s notice on crisis pregnancy centers
The San Francisco-based company, which runs the Yelp.com website that publishes crowd-sourced reviews of businesses, has been attempting to separate crisis pregnancy centers from abortion clinics on the platform since 2018.
The new, prominently-placed notice is only the latest move to do so. It will be applied to listings for both faith-based and non-faith-based crisis pregnancy centers.
Yelp has also recently recategorized thousands of providers as crisis pregnancy centers.
Many crisis pregnancy centers do not offer abortion services and offer women support and material resources instead.
“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, told Axios.
Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser slammed Yelp’s move in a statement, saying the “discriminatory labels” are meant to “scare women away” from getting the resources they need.
“Shame on Big Tech companies like Yelp for colluding with the abortion lobby in their war on compassionate pregnancy help,” Dannenfelser said.
“The abortion lobby meanwhile fights tooth and nail against women’s right to informed consent, including hearing their baby’s heartbeat or seeing an ultrasound,” she continued. “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.”
Passions have been high around abortion access since the weeks leading up to June 24, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 landmark decision that legalized abortion nationwide.
Less than a week after Roe was overturned, Google came under pressure from New York Attorney General Letitia James, who sent a letter urging the tech behemoth to make sure Google Maps searches for “abortion” do not bring up local crisis pregnancy centers.
About 64% of Americans, including 70% of Democrats, support publicly funding pregnancy centers, according to an 85 Fund poll conducted by CRC Research. When poll participants were shown what services pregnancy centers offer, 74% said they supported funding them.
Additionally, 80% of those polled said protesters who committed violence against pregnancy centers should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, according to the poll.
Both leading up to the Roe decision and following it, crisis pregnancy centers have been targeted with violence.
Days before the Roe decision, pro-abortion activists firebombed a crisis pregnancy center in Oregon.
“If abortions aren’t safe then you aren’t either,” read a message scrawled on the side of the offices of a pro-life organization in Wisconsin, which were firebombed on Mother’s Day.
A similar message was spray-painted on the sidewalk outside a Massachusetts crisis pregnancy center.
Perpetrators have also smashed windows and vandalized centers with red paint.
Currently, pregnancy centers and community-based health clinics outnumber Planned Parenthood clinics by 14 to 1 across the country.