A sonogram picture of a fetus in the second trimester of a woman’s pregnancy / Shutterstock
Newsroom in Washington, DC, August 24, 2022, 13:32 (CNA).
Yelp’s move to post warnings on pregnancy clinics listed on its well-known platform, which depends on the public to rate and review local businesses, has drawn criticism from pro-life organizations and networks of pregnancy centers.
The business said on Tuesday that it will start posting “consumer alerts” on pregnancy clinics’ review sites.
Pregnancy center networks retaliated by contesting Yelp’s action.
According to Care Net’s president and chief executive officer Roland Warren, who oversees a network of 1,100 pregnancy clinics, “every doctor’s office in the nation offers minimal medical services.” “They won’t do foot surgery if you go to a heart surgeon,”
Warren said that Yelp’s warnings seem to target pro-life organizations unfairly.
He emphasized that “Planned Parenthood also offers minimal medical services.” They provide abortions, but if you have difficulties, they refer you to the emergency department.
He questioned, “So why did Yelp just add this notice for pregnancy centers?”
In the United States, hundreds of thousands of women get low- to no-cost life-affirming treatment from almost 3,000 pregnancy clinics. The Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI), the research branch of SBA Pro-Life America, estimates that these facilities provided services and donations totaling more than $266 million in just 2019 alone.
In 2019, CLI discovered that several of these facilities had medical personnel working there. 10,215 licensed medical practitioners were identified as being employed by pregnancy centers. That comprised 12% of all volunteers and 25% of all paid employees.
The assertion that facilities “may not have licensed medical personnel present” was a “red herring,” according to Warren at Care Net.
“We have staff on site who are licensed to give those particular medical treatments,” Warren stated of the facilities where we provide our services. “We definitely don’t have to have licensed medical experts on-site at sites where we don’t offer medical services. It’s irrelevant.
Following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in June, Noorie Malik, vice president of user operations at Yelp, explained the company’s decision to add new notices on Yelp business pages for “Crisis Pregnancy Centers and Faith-based Crisis Pregnancy Centers.”
It is well known that crisis pregnancy centers do not provide abortion services, and research has revealed that many of them intentionally provide false information in an effort to divert patients who are looking for abortion treatment to other locations. We want to better safeguard customers from the possibility of being duped or confused with this updated consumer notification.
“Just the same old boring cliché about pregnancy clinics being deceitful,” Warren said of Yelp’s reasoning for its new notice.
He said, “Anyone who is interested in checking what pregnancy centers really do, what they actually tell their customers, and the respectable sources that they utilize to support every single one of those assertions, has been interested in disproving this claim over and over again.”
Pregnant women should choose where to get assistance, not Yelp, according to Andrea Trudden, vice president of communications and marketing at Heartbeat International, a network that supports hundreds of pregnancy clinics.
According to Trudden, “women who use these services largely rate pregnancy centers satisfactorily for the care they get.”
In a “ongoing saga,” Trudden described Yelp’s decision to include these institutions. With more than 3,000 member sites, her organization describes itself as the first network of pro-life pregnancy resource centers in the United States and the largest network ever.
Ironically, Trudden told CNA, “they really eliminate any semblance of ‘choice’ in their drive to identify pregnancy clinics so that women only encounter abortion doctors while seeking pregnancy support.” “Logic tells me that a Yelp employee with an agenda is not as knowledgeable about the services offered as the group running the pregnancy center.”
Yelp moderators have “manually evaluated tens of thousands of business listings since 2018 and recategorized businesses that do not actually provide abortion services as either Crisis Pregnancy Centers or Faith-based Crisis Pregnancy Centers,” according to Malik, who was quoted in Tuesday’s Yelp announcement. She assured the audience that the organization will carry out its research and “intend to analyze a total of 55,000+ business sites throughout the U.S., Canada, and Puerto Rico.”
For the interest of complete openness, Trudden urged Yelp to reveal the source of the list of pregnancy assistance groups that they are now designating. She continued by saying that Yelp had in the past made a vocal case for abortion.
It joined a lengthy list of businesses earlier this year that promised to pay for workers’ travel expenses for abortions.
Yelp’s choice coincides with a period in which pregnancy clinics are subject to “an unprecedented outbreak of assaults,” according to Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of SBA Pro-Life America.
She criticized large technology corporations like Yelp for collaborating with the abortion lobby in their campaign against compassionate pregnancy support. Discriminatory labels are used to prevent women from accessing the resources and help they need, not to enlighten or educate them.
Dannenfelser emphasized the advantages pregnancy clinics provide.
Pregnancy clinics in America are there to help women and their families, she added, eliminating financial constraints and other forms of compulsion. If Big Tech’s labels were truthful, they would highlight all the real services that pregnancy centers offer that Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry do not, including diapers, formula, clothing, strollers, parenting and childbirth classes, education and career help, and much more — usually for no cost.
By the time of publishing, Yelp has not responded to a request for comment.