The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling to uphold access to the abortion medication mifepristone marks an important step in the right direction for the future of reproductive health care in the United States, especially after many attacks against reproductive rights in the last few years.
But how does one gain access to this medication in the first place?
If you go to Google and type “I need an abortion in Portland, Maine,” one of the first websites that pops up, if not the first, will be for a group called ABBA Women’s Choice.
If you click on the link to their website you will see headlines along the lines of: “Take a free pregnancy test to verify your pregnancy” and “We can help you find out how far along you are with our lab-grade pregnancy tests and state-of-the-art ultrasound technology.” Seems convincing enough, doesn’t it? In fact, it seems almost too good to be true that there could be a health care company providing free abortion care services with no insurance card necessary.
Well, it is too good to be true.
ABBA Women’s Choice is a “crisis pregnancy center,” more accurately described as an antiabortion clinic. There are nearly 4,000 of these “clinics” nationwide, all run by antiabortion activists. Their seemingly judgment-free websites prey on newly pregnant people in an effort to spread lies about abortion safety in the hope that people may reconsider having an abortion.
These “clinics” are particularly dangerous to our community because they conveniently jump around laws that would make their deceptive actions illegal. Because these antiabortion establishments do not technically sell anything to users, they do not fall under the Federal Trade Commission regulations that prevent businesses from knowingly deceiving consumers. More importantly, because these are not actual health care facilities, they are not bound by the HIPAA laws that protect private patient information.
The result of this is that, especially in small cities like Portland, anyone who seeks care at one of these facilities is not safe from other people knowing they were there and what they were there for. This can be highly dangerous for individuals who would not want their families, friends or co-workers to know that they were attempting to seek out an abortion.
It is important to highlight that these antiabortion facilities do not offer abortions, nor do they offer referral services for abortion. In fact, none of their staff are licensed medical professionals, though they are known to walk around in white coats, creating the appearance of qualified health care providers.
The free “ultrasounds” advertised on their website come with inconclusive results that would delay abortion care. What these facilities do offer is religiously and politically fueled antiabortion “counseling” that is designed to prevent abortion at all costs.
Antiabortion clinics are federally funded with millions of taxpayer dollars through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.
Yes, you read that correctly.
In fact, they pull in hundreds of millions of dollars of federal and state funding every year to keep their operations running, not to mention business and private donations. Despite efforts from the Biden administration to stop millions of dollars of funding from reaching these organizations, the Republican Party has managed to successfully block those attempts.
It is our responsibility as a community to do what we can to protect our most vulnerable people. In this instance, that means protecting people seeking abortion care. These crisis pregnancy centers, these antiabortion clinics, spread disinformation about abortion, and it is imperative that their efforts are stopped.
This also raises the question of what Google’s responsibility is in all of this. Google advertising offers antiabortion activists the opportunity to purchase prime real estate on the platform so that they are the first resource that pops up when someone searches for abortion care. This happens despite the fact that these antiabortion organizations are known to spread harmful disinformation. Many social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok have warning labels on posts that spread false information in an effort to reduce harm to its users. Why doesn’t Google do the same?
We need to work together to put an end to the spread of abortion care disinformation and harassment by antiabortion activist groups.
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