Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against the popular review website Yelp for adding allegedly misleading and inaccurate language to listings of pregnancy resource centers.
According to the Texas Scorecard, Yelp added a disclaimer to the pages of pregnancy resource centers that do not perform abortions. The disclaimer stated that the centers “typically provide limited medical services and may not have licensed medical professionals onsite.”
Paxton argues that such language is deceptive and incorrect, as pregnancy resource centers often offer medical services with licensed medical specialists onsite. The lawsuit alleges that Yelp violated Texas’ Deceptive Trade Practices Act. Paxton said that Yelp cannot deceive the public simply because the company disagrees with Texas’ abortion laws.
Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman had previously issued a public statement arguing that companies should take action in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022.
“Restricting women’s rights to decide when to start or expand their families impedes on their constitutional liberties, denies them their human rights, and jeopardizes the progress they have made over the past 50 years. It’s high time that business leaders use their platform and influence to help ensure that reproductive rights are codified into law,” Stoppelman wrote last year in an op-ed.
Stoppelman recently claimed the allegedly misleading language had been removed from its pregnancy resource center descriptions, but Paxton is still going through with the lawsuit.
“[W]hatever the merits of informing consumers about where they can seek an abortion, that goal is completely irrelevant to Yelp’s misleading consumer notice about whether pregnancy resource centers perform medical services or have licensed medical professionals. … Yelp refused to remove the misleading disclaimer for several months, likely diverting consumers from seeking pregnancy resource centers’ services in favor of other facilities that lacked the misleading disclosure,” the lawsuit reads.
Yelp will face penalties and other legal actions for its “unlawful behavior,” Paxton said in the suit.
“It’s been well-reported that crisis pregnancy centers do not offer abortion services or referrals to them, and that many provide misleading information in an attempt to steer people seeking abortion care to other options — this often starts with an online search,” Yelp told The Wall Street Journal in a prepared statement.
