US Lawmakers Urge Google To Give Accurate Results On Clinics To People Seeking Abortion

The letter was signed by 14 senators and seven members of the US House of Representatives.

Representative Image

New Delhi: The US lawmakers wrote to Google on Friday, urging the search engine to come up with accurate results for people seeking abortions, rather than sending them to "crisis pregnancy centres," steering women to ‘fake clinics’, news agency Reuters reported. The request came in a letter, whose top signatories were Senator Mark Warner and Representative Elissa Slotkin.

The letter was signed by 14 senators and seven members of the US House of Representatives.

The letter comes in the light of a recent study conducted across 13 states, by the non-profit Center for Countering Digital Hate, as per which 11% of the results for a search for an "abortion clinic near me" or "abortion pill" in some states led to centres that oppose abortion.

However, Google declined to comment on the letter to Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai, but said, "We're always looking at ways to improve our results to help people find what they're looking for, or understand if what they're looking for may not be available."

Notably, crisis pregnancy centres reflect disagreements in the United States over the right to terminate a pregnancy. Some of the centres have also been accused of giving women inaccurate information about their pregnancy, thus, jeopardising their access to abortion.

"Google should not be displaying anti-abortion fake clinics or crisis pregnancy centres," the lawmakers wrote, adding, "If Google must continue showing these misleading results...the results should, at the very least, be appropriately labelled."

The study also found that in the states concerned, 28% of the Google Ads were for anti-abortion centres, as were 37% of the results on Google Maps.

The letter also said that some of the centres had disclaimers but not all.