- Yelp is flagging business pages for crisis pregnancy centers with a consumer notice.
- The notice lets users know these centers "typically provide limited medical services."
- The company hopes it will help clear up confusion between the centers and actual abortion clinics.
Yelp is rolling out a new system to prevent confusion between anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers and actual abortion clinics.
The company said in a statement shared with Insider that it started flagging crisis pregnancy centers and faith-based crisis pregnancy centers with a "consumer notice" that tells users these types of facilities "typically provide limited medical services and may not have licensed medical professionals onsite."
Crisis pregnancy centers are organizations that aim to prevent abortions through adoption and parenting resources. Many of these types of centers are known for using vague language that can confuse people seeking abortion care into seeking help there — but these centers don't always employ licensed medical professionals and often can only provide ultrasounds and pregnancy tests.
Yelp said it hopes the new flagging system will help to clarify the services that these centers do, and don't, provide.
"It's been well-reported that crisis pregnancy centers often attempt to provide misleading information to people seeking abortion care to steer them to other options – with this new notification we're aiming to further protect consumers from the potential of being misled or confused," a spokesperson for the company said in a statement to Insider.
NBC reported last month that activists had previously criticized Yelp after it disabled reviews for some crisis pregnancy centers and abortion providers. The move came after some of the pages were being "review bombed" by abortion-rights activists, leading Yelp to stop the ability to post on some of the business pages.
Yelp has also worked to better the platform's search tools by making it "less likely" that a crisis pregnancy center comes up in the results for someone seeking abortion care.
In 2019, the company told Rewire News Group that it had moderators check listings for around 33,000 businesses and recategorized around 470 pages to make it clear that crisis pregnancy centers don't offer abortion services.