Yelp adds notices to listings for crisis pregnancy centers

Yelp added a consumer notice to all listings for crisis pregnancy centers to ensure differentiation from abortion clinics.

The company announced on Tuesday that it was adding a notice to the top of all known crisis pregnancy centers informing users that these centers do not offer abortion. It’s the latest decision by tech companies to affect the ability of crisis pregnancy centers to reach those seeking abortions.

The centers “provide limited medical services and may not have licensed medical professionals there,” the notice reads.

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“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.

Yelp was recently the focus of a series of political initiatives to ensure crisis pregnancy centers were identified correctly due to concerns about them using deceptive marketing techniques. Gen-Z for Change, a group of young activists and influencers, created software to bombard Yelp profiles of crisis pregnancy centers with negative reviews to ensure others knew they did not provide abortions.

While the software bombarded crisis pregnancy centers for a day or so, Yelp said it restricted the ability to post reviews on those pages because the reviews were “statements of ideological stances” and not “genuine consumer experiences.”

Yelp has attempted to modify its system in the past to ensure that its listings identified abortion clinics and crisis pregnancy centers correctly. The company recategorized its listings in 2018 by manually reviewing more than 2,000 businesses and clinics to “improve the accuracy” of its categorization of abortion providers and crisis pregnancy centers and has regularly reviewed its listings to confirm whether a company provides abortion services.

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Yelp is not the only technology company being scrutinized for its approach to pregnancy-related information. Several other technology companies have been pressured to provide accurate abortion-related information and to stop crisis pregnancy centers from being promoted. Pro-abortion-rights activists have also called for crisis pregnancy centers to have more noticeable labels identifying them as anti-abortion.