Free Google ads for anti-abortion groups

Picture: London, 2025 March for Life counter protest

In late November 2025, Scottish newspaper The National reported that Google had given thousands of pounds worth of free advertising to anti-abortion groups. The groups are registered charities and therefore qualify for Google Ad Grants, a scheme which gives non-profit organisations up to £7000 a month in free adverts. As a result, adverts for pregnancy crisis helplines appeared alongside Google search results. The adverts appear to offer neutral advice or services – such as free pregnancy testing – and do not show any link to the anti-abortion ideologies of the organisations running them.

One organisation, Pregnancy Crisis Helpline, offered ‘a safe, confidential place to talk through your feelings and your choices’. The helpline was co-launched by Christian Concern, an evangelical group that campaigns for the banning of abortion in the UK. Its website calls Stella Creasy’s amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill to decriminalise abortion for a woman acting in relation to her own pregnancy ‘evil’, stating ‘this law has no place in a civilised society’. Life, the group offering free pregnancy testing, has previously falsely linked abortion to breast cancer, mental illness, and increased suicide risk.

These adverts deliberately mislead Google users. Groups with a history of peddling medical misinformation, and who are fundamentally opposed to abortion, will not offer unbiased advice. They risk causing confusion and delay in receiving legitimate advice or treatment.

Members of Scottish Parliament have condemned Google for awarding these grants. Abortion Rights UK have called on Google to tighten rules about which organisations can advertise to users seeking abortion care, prioritise medically verified sources, suspend advertising privileges for groups that have spread false or harmful health information and increase transparency around the eligibility and oversight of charities using Ad Grants for health related advertising.

BIG TECH

This controversy highlights the power that Google and other large tech companies wield in deciding what we are shown – and not shown – online. The search results we receive when we Google something are not randomly decided or free from the influence of capital.

This is not the first time search engines have been in hot water for the way they have displayed information about reproductive health. In 2015, Google awarded $120,000 in ad grants to Obria Group. The group runs a network of crisis pregnancy clinics (CPCs), which seek to deter pregnant visitors from having abortions, funded by Catholic organisations.

There is also money to be made. In 2023, the Observer and the Citizens revealed Facebook had been paid an average of £117,000 that year by Right to Life UK for adverts. In 2020 and 2021, when attempts were made in parliament to fully decriminalise abortion, the group ran paid anti-abortion adverts on Facebook.

CRISIS PREGNANCY CENTRES

The Pregnancy Crisis Helpline, and the services offered by other anti-abortion organisations, fall under the category of crisis pregnancy centres. Like their adverts, the centres often appear as impartial organisations. They present as medical centres, and may offer some medical services, but their aim is to dissuade pregnant people from having abortions. A 2023 Panorama documentary detailed how CPCs spread misinformation about the safety of abortions. In Coercion (reviewed later in this issue of Women’s Fightback), Kylie Cheung highlights the role that CPCs play in the USA’s post-Roe reproductive landscape. Cheung reports that in the first two years after the overturning of ‘Roe v. Wade’ state governments gave CPCs almost $500 million in funding. CPCs prey on vulnerable people during a time which is likely to cause stress and anxiety. In the USA, where healthcare is private, most visitors to CPCs are young and on low incomes. CPCs cause confusion and distress, and mislead individuals until they are past abortion term limits. Their veneer of medical legitimacy also causes harm. Cheung relates the story of a woman who consented to receiving an invasive ultrasound at a CPC, unaware that the worker who did this was not a medical professional. Believing the CPC was a medical facility, she was also willing to provide her contact details and was bombarded with calls after her visit until she blocked the centre’s number.

It’s worth noting that the charitable status of CPCs, or the organisations that run them, has led to them accessing other charitable funds, including in the past from the UK government. An investigation by Amnesty International UK revealed that CPCs had received support from the National Lottery Community Fund and the Conservative government’s Coronavirus Community Fund during the pandemic.

MASKS OFF

Digital technologies and social media are pervasive and ever-present in our lives. For those born after the millennium, it may well feel like they have always been around. But these technologies are not ephemeral digital things, existing somewhere ‘out there’ in cyberspace. They make up a digital infrastructure, owned and run largely by private businesses, who as such hold immense power in deciding what we see online, and in turn, what we think and do in the ‘real world’. Like any other form of infrastructure or industry, its ownership is not fixed. This story highlights the need for a democratically-run internet.

CPCs work to confuse, mislead and pressure pregnant people into continuing pregnancies they might not want. Their charitable status is questionable, although not surprising. So many organisations are registered as charities that we might not give much thought to what this means in practice. In this case, charitable status helps legitimise CPCs and spread their influence with free advertising and other grants. We must not allow CPCs to continue to masquerade as unbiased, semi-medical establishments. Last summer, the law was amended so that people in England and Wales can no longer be prosecuted for ending their own pregnancy. However, abortion remains a criminal offence, and the fight for full reproductive rights is far from over.