Google targets low-income US women with ads for anti-abortion pregnancy centers, study shows

Low-income women in some cities are more likely than their wealthier counterparts to be targeted by Google ads promoting anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers when they search for abortion care, researchers at the Tech Transparency Project have found.

In Arizona and Florida abortion is banned after 15 weeks of pregnancy. In Georgia, it is banned after six weeks, at which point many people do not know they are pregnant.

Lower-income women are the group least likely to be able to travel for abortion care because traveling can cost thousands of dollars in lost work, transportation, babysitting and accommodation fees.

The results were not the same in all cities. In Miami, researchers saw the inverse result: high-income women were more likely to get ads from crisis centers than lower-income women. The researchers say they cannot be certain why Miami diverged from the other cities but speculate that crisis pregnancy centers might more actively target low-income women in more restrictive states. (While Arizona and Florida both ban abortion after 15 weeks, the former has more restrictions layered on the 15-week limit.)

While pregnancy crisis centers offer pregnant women resources such as diapers and pregnancy testing, they have also been known to employ a number of shady tactics to convince women seeking an abortion to keep their pregnancies. Those include posing as abortion clinics online though they do not offer abortion care, refusing pregnancy tests for women who say they intend to have an abortion and touting widely disputed research about abortion care to patients. Crisis centers, which go largely unregulated despite offering medical services, have been known to target low-income women precisely because they find it harder to travel out of state for abortion care.

Google has repeatedly been pressed to make changes to its search engine to curtail these issues. In 2022, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia and Representative Elissa Slotkin of Michigan wrote to the company twice, urging it to stop misdirecting users searching for abortion care to these crisis centers in Google Maps. The lawmakers also called on Google to limit the way crisis centers appear in search results and ads, and to add disclaimers clearly indicating whether a search result is an organization that provides abortions or not.

Google responded by pledging to clearly label these facilities in the future. But researchers in the study also found a number of ads still being served to users suggesting centers offer abortion care when they do not.

Slotkin said she was disappointed to learn the company is still failing to regulate crisis centers on its platform, despite having been in touch with them twice about the issue.

The Guardian contacted Google for comment and on Monday evening an unnamed spokesman sent a response.