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by Bethany Lira, Marketing & Communications Coordinator
The modern age is all about online information and instant access right at your fingertips. Knowing this, we continue to expand our online presence. At Informed Choices, we strive to reach the woman facing pregnancy indecision and offer her the information and support she needs to make a fully informed choice. We utilize each online platform to try to reach HER first, despite being continually met with challenges from Big Tech and California legislators.
Last August, we launched an updated website with a modernized look and verbiage to appeal to the abortion-minded woman. Our Facebook, Instagram, and Google ads and posts are geared towards this woman, who may be asking more questions about abortion in this post-Roe vs. Wade climate. We continue to battle mainstream media platforms like Yelp and Google, which oppose faith-based clinics. Despite our attempts to work with Yelp, they prohibit our ability to categorize our business appropriately, specifically as a licensed community clinic. Yelp has also placed a permanent consumer notice at the top of our page to attempt to deter individuals from choosing our business, which reads “This is a Crisis Pregnancy Center. Crisis Pregnancy Centers do not offer abortions or referrals to abortion providers.” Google has also placed a filter on abortion-related searches preventing clinics like ours from being visible.
In addition to Big Tech, California State Legislators continue to put forth legislation to oppose pregnancy medical clinics, such as ours, and label them as fake or misleading. They seek to attack our motives and our credibility as a licensed medical clinic. Monitoring the legislature’s activity requires that we do our due diligence to meet the demands of current and proposed legislation. For example, we have assured that our website is fully transparent about the services we do and do not provide, use HIPAA-compliant contact forms, and have no personal health information (PHI) collected or stored on our site. This along with the ever-changing legislative climate and the hurdles presented by Big Tech comes at a significant cost – the cost of staff time, research, and implementation of these demands as well as outside counsel and the hiring of professional expertise.
We cannot ignore the reality of Big Tech censorship and legislative strong-arming. In today's cancel culture, we are a target, and we must not disappear. We need to reach HER and be present where she lives – online. Her search results may directly impact her decision-making process and ultimately whether or not she chooses LIFE.