AUSTIN (LifeSiteNews) — Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton announced on Thursday that he is bringing a lawsuit against business review platform Yelp for adding “inaccurate and misleading language” about pro-life crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) in violation of the Lone Star State’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act.
The openly pro-abortion platform has “appended language to all pregnancy resource center Yelp pages, indicating that those pages ‘typically provide limited medical services and may not have licensed medical professionals onsite,’” according to a press release from Paxton’s office. “That disclaimer is misleading and often untrue because pregnancy resource centers frequently do provide medical services with licensed medical professionals onsite. Moreover, when informed by pregnancy resource centers that this statement was untrue, Yelp left up the misleading disclaimer on those centers’ Yelp pages until reproached by Attorney General Paxton earlier this year.”
“Yelp cannot mislead and deceive the public simply because the company disagrees with our state’s abortion laws,” said Paxton. “Major companies cannot abuse their platforms and influence to control consumers’ behavior, especially on sensitive health issues like pregnancy and abortion.”
A Yelp spokesperson gave a response to Fox News summarizing the suit as Texas “tak[ing] issue with a truthful consumer notice that hasn’t been used on the Yelp site for over six months, won’t be used again, and which was helpful in informing consumers about crisis pregnancy centers,” whereas Paxton’s office has previously conceded that Yelp’s current notice on CPCs is an “accurate description.”
To that point, the lawsuit says that while Yelp “appears to have eliminated this misleading disclaimer from pregnancy resource centers’ Yelp pages, Yelp remains liable for penalties and other relief for the duration of its unlawful behavior,” and seeks an order enjoining Yelp from resuming such misrepresentations in the future, along with civil penalties and monetary damages.
“[F]or nearly six months Yelp singled out pregnancy resource centers for an alleged lack of medical professionals on site, effectively dissuading innumerable consumers who may otherwise have utilized these centers for medical and other services,” the suit says. “To date, clinics offering abortion services are free of any sort of disclaimers on Yelp, even if they lack licensed medical professionals onsite, while the webpages for pregnancy resource centers universally contain the updated disclaimer […] Other types of facilities, such as Planned Parenthood and clinics performing abortion services, did not have disclaimers placed on their webpages even if the disclaimer would have been true for that facility.”
CPCs have long been a target of left-wing rage for offering an alternative to the abortion industry, with attacks often focusing on claims that they deceive women, both about abortion and about their own services. But the pro-life contentions most often derided as “misinformation” are in fact true, and accusations of self-misrepresentation typically refer to little more than the fact that ads for them appear in online searches for the term “abortion.”
Left-wing hostility to CPCs drastically intensified with the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturn of Roe v. Wade last year, which triggered the activation of numerous state laws that forced scores of Planned Parenthood facilities across the country to shut down. CPCs became the targets of violence, vandalism, and threats, and politicians including President Joe Biden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer have called for new limits on their funding, speech rights, and very existence.