Yelp added a label to pregnancy resource centers in Texas clarifying they “typically provide limited medical services and may not have licensed medical professionals on-site,” according to the lawsuit. Paxton’s office called that label “misleading and often untrue,” and said Yelp left the label up “until reproached by Attorney General Paxton earlier this year.”
Paxton, a Republican who has been Texas attorney general since 2015, argues the addition is a political motive by Yelp’s CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, who has called for companies to “take action” to support employees and customers accessing abortion care.
“Yelp’s CEO is entitled to his views on abortion, but he was not entitled to use the Yelp platform to deceptively disparage facilities that counsel pregnant women instead of providing abortions,” Paxton’s office said in its statement.
The lawsuit alleges Yelp violated Texas’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act, and seeks penalties that “could exceed” $1 million, as well as other unspecified measures against the company.
In an effort to head off the lawsuit, Yelp filed its own suit on Wednesday against Paxton, a day after the company received a letter from the attorney general’s office about the impending suit.
Yelp said in a statement on Thursday that its earlier label was “truthful” but that its language for antiabortion pregnancy center listings has since been changed. “This is a Crisis Pregnancy Center,” it now reads. “Crisis Pregnancy Centers do not offer abortions or referrals to abortion providers.”
Yelp said that Paxton’s office was taking issue “with a truthful consumer notice that hasn’t been used on the Yelp site in over six months, won’t be used again, and which was helpful in informing consumers about crisis pregnancy centers.”
A year after the fall of Roe, tech companies are increasingly facing a fragmented patchwork of state laws governing digital information related to abortion. Tech companies find themselves at the center of a political tug of war between red states and blue states.
In liberal states, policymakers are forging ahead with legislation to protect reproductive data online. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) in April signed a first-of-its-kind bill into law that creates protections for sensitive health data, responding to concerns that data stored or sold by tech companies could be used to aid prosecutions related to abortions.
Meanwhile, there have been attempts within Republican legislatures to limit access to information about how to obtain an abortion. Last year, South Carolina state legislators introduced a bill that would outlaw providing information over the internet or phone about how to obtain an abortion. Those provisions ultimately did not become law, amid concerns about the effect on Americans’ free-speech rights.
Texas has moved particularly fast, outlawing most abortions in September 2021, nine months before the Supreme Court decision.
Internet companies that provide directory and mapping services have struggled with their approach amid the shifting laws. Google announced in August 2022 it would label medical clinics and hospitals providing abortion care in its Maps app, after coming under fire from abortion advocates that searches for abortion care often returned links to antiabortion pregnancy centers.
Responding to similar criticism, Yelp had said in 2019 that it had separated its pregnancy center listings into pro-abortion and antiabortion facilities through a time-consuming manual process.
In the weeks after Roe was overturned, Google said it would delete its users’ location history whenever they visit an abortion clinic, domestic violence shelter or other sensitive places, responding to pressure from activists and some of its own employees who said the tech giant should stop collecting some data in case police ask for it in order to prosecute abortion.
But a Washington Post analysis eight months after Google announced the change, showed that the company still collected map data from devices that visited abortion and fertility clinics in California and Florida.
Stoppelman, the Yelp CEO, wrote an essay in “Fast Company” last year urging other companies to support their employees in accessing abortion care, and calling on Congress to codify abortion access into law.
Paxton’s office announced in February that it sent a letter to Yelp’s CEO over this pregnancy center labeling issue. The news release from Paxton’s office includes an undated update saying Yelp has since replaced it with an accurate description.
Gerrit De Vynck contributed to this report.
