Still Being Evil

Despite is statements that it would no longer do so, Google is still running advertisements for the phony "Pregnancy Crisis Centers" in response to searches about abortion and birth control.

This is not just unethical, it is knowingly aiding fraud:

Google is still effectively directing women seeking abortions to anti-abortion centers that masquerade as legit abortion clinics.

This is despite the internet giant's wider efforts to convince us it's committed to protecting reproductive rights in post-Roe America.

According to a Tech Transparency Project (TTP) report published on Thursday, women using Google to find abortion providers continue to be shown, in the search results, ads for so-called pregnancy crisis centers, which offer no medical services for those seeking a termination and instead try to talk pregnant women out of a procedure.

For its investigation, TTP used a fresh, logged-out Google Chrome with no prior browsing history. Additionally, for location-specific searches, the researchers used a VPN to make it look like they were searching from that location used in the search.


Here's what happened next, according to the TTP researchers:

We quickly found more than a dozen questionable crisis pregnancy center ads. For example, when our test user searched for 'Where can I get an abortion in Illinois,' Google served an ad for a 'Free Abortion Pill.' But the ad was for Prestonwood Pregnancy Center, a crisis pregnancy center based in Texas.

Needless to say, Prestonwood doesn't provide medical abortions or free abortion pills. These and other crisis pregnancy center ads do, in very small type in the search results, note: "Does not provide abortions.

Google just wants the advertising money, and they behave accordingly.

This is an excellent argument for breaking them up.  When a company like Google has a monopoly, it means that they have no incentives to do right by their customers (the advertisers) or their users (us hoi polloi).