Although it has been legal for nearly 50 years, abortion has always been inaccessible to the people who need it most. Almost 1 in 4 women will have an abortion by the age of 45, making it one of the most common of all health procedures. Yet abortion operates in the shadows. Most women do not publicly discuss their abortion experiences, compounding shame and stigma. Finding an abortion provider has, for most of the last 50 years, required women to run through an obstacle course of hurdles, barriers, and threats. Abortion Clinics Online, the first online clinic directory, has been around for 25 years, steadily making abortion more accessible.
How Abortion Clinic Directories Revolutionized Women’s Care
The Internet opened new doors to abortion access, according to Ann Rose, founder of Abortion Clinics Online. “Before the Internet, there was no abortion clinic heading in the phone book. Women often had barriers to locating an abortion clinic near them. The advent of the Internet really opened new avenues for women to get good and accurate information about abortion services available in their area,” she said.
Rose speaks from experience. She founded Abortion Clinics Online in 1995, long before the days of online review sites, Google, and social media. For many women in the early days of the Internet, the site made the difference between finding a list of quality abortion clinics and finding no clinic at all.
One of Rose’s first clinic clients in 1995 was Dr. George Tiller. He was skeptical at first because nobody really knew the power of the Internet at that time. Then a late-term medical abortion patient from England contacted him. She found him online after her own doctor gave her no hope. He was convinced.
Though Rose hoped to make abortion more accessible, one barrier has remained constant: anti-choicers who care only about life in the womb. She and her team consistently received threats. Far from idle, these menacing statements have long been backed up by a far-right terrorist campaign against abortion clinics. Anti-choice views have ranked among the top three motives for terrorist campaigns for 40 years. Hundreds of clinics have been bombed, burned, or faced other acts of violence. And despite widespread support for abortion, even among Republicans, the data shows that the rate of violence is steadily rising. George Tiller, Rose’s first client, was assassinated in 2009.
The threats did not deter early abortion pioneers like Rose, who knew that a world without abortion is a constant threat to women’s lives. Research from other nations shows that banning abortion doesn’t end it. In Latin America, where abortion is mostly banned, the abortion rate is higher than in the United States. Worldwide, there are 25 million unsafe abortions each year, sending at least 7 million women to the hospital. Tens of thousands die from unsafe abortion annually, making it a leading cause of maternal mortality.
Following Rose’s lead, newer directories have joined the fold. The National Abortion Federation and the Abortion Care Network both assist women to find providers. The ever-growing list of options now also includes nonprofit directories such as INeedanA.org and AbortionFinder.org
Meanwhile, in the United States, maternal mortality is rising—even as it has fallen in almost every other country around the globe. Access to quality abortion is a matter of life and death in a healthcare system that continues to fail women. That action is constantly under threat.
While Abortion Clinics Online and other directories have made abortion more accessible, abortion-seekers still face significant barriers. While abortion clinic listing services can help connect people to real clinics, they can’t keep up with the surge of fake clinics currently overtaking search results.
The Fight Against Fake Abortion Clinics
”Searching for an abortion clinic can be confusing because so many anti-abortion ‘crisis pregnancy centers’ have online sites that look like they actually provide abortions when they actually discourage women from getting abortions,” explained Rose.
These “clinics,” which aren’t clinics at all, lure women in with promises of free pregnancy tests and other resources. Then they attempt to discourage them from seeking an abortion. If that fails, they use delay tactics. Sometimes they tell women they offer abortions, but continue to push back the procedure until the woman is past the legal limit.
Because these centers are not real clinics, they are not governed by medical privacy laws. This means they may gain access to sensitive medical records, then leak that data to third parties. In at least one case, this caused a clinic and the anti-choicers who supported it to stalk a teenager. The Supreme Court recently ruled that free speech laws protect the right of these clinics to lie to patients.
Taxpayer funds frequently support these crisis pregnancy centers, even though they offer no medical services. In Texas, fake clinics outnumber real clinics 10 to 1, and half receive taxpayer money. This funding presents a serious challenge to real abortion clinics, which operate on a shoestring budget. Well-funded crisis pregnancy centers can buy up Google ads, driving up the cost of certain keywords and ensuring they are more visible than real clinics in search results.
Abortion Clinics Online is fighting back. Always an innovator, it’s now working to fight the scourge of crisis pregnancy centers online while making listings for real clinics more visible.
Its new Abortion Facts page serves up a dose of real science to act as an antidote to the scare tactics and outright lies about abortion that proliferate online. It’s a game of whack-a-mole that is stacked against abortion directories, clinics, and the people they serve. Innovation—something the pro-choice movement specializes in—is the only way out.
Voting protects not just the legal right to abortion but the ability to find and safely access clinics. If Biden selects the next few Supreme Court justices, we could make real headway in the fight against anti-abortion terrorism. A vote for the Democrat is a vote for women’s lives.