Google to Properly Label Abortion Services in Maps, Search

Google is making it easier to identify healthcare facilities that provide abortion services.

The company has announced that it will apply new labels—”Provides abortion” and “Might not provide abortions”—to healthcare facilities that appear in Maps and Search. The services will also display a prompt to “Search farther away” if there are no results in the designated area.

“When people turn to Google to find local information, we aim to help them easily explore the range of places available so they can determine which are most helpful to them,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement to PCMag.

The spokesperson added that Google is “regularly calling businesses directly and working with authoritative data sources” to confirm the authenticity of its results. (It also put these labels through its “standard testing and evaluation process” before launch.)

The company is going to apply labels to results shown when people search for veterans hospitals, too, and plans to expand these identifiers to other kinds of facilities in the future. But it makes sense to start with abortion providers given changing policies in the post-Roe era.

Bloomberg reported(Opens in a new window) on Aug. 15 that Google would lead users to crisis pregnancy centers, which the outlet described as “a type of non-medical organization with a mission to encourage women […] to go through with their unwanted pregnancies,” if they searched for abortion providers. These labels will make it easier for Google users to find the results they’re looking for.

Yelp announced a similar change this week, although it opted to call out crisis pregnancy centers for offering limited or no medical services, rather than applying labels to abortion providers.