As this Respect Life Month comes to an end and 40 Days for Life campaigns begin to wrap up Google’s pro-abortion agenda could not be more clear.
Google has repeatedly shown its support of abortion and a lack of respect for human life in the womb. From bolstering Planned Parenthood in a search for the word “pregnancy” the day before the 2023 March for Life to canceling ads for life-saving abortion pill reversal and to its monetary support of radical pro-abortion organizations, Google has repeatedly shown its unapologetically pro-abortion bent. The examples span across Google’s search engine, its AI chatbot Bard, Google Ads and the company’s policies.
"Google is in lock-step with their leftist allies and the legacy media,” said MRC President Brent Bozell. “Google's algorithm continues to elevate research favorable to the pro-aborts while suppressing good news for the pro-life movement."
MRC Free Speech America searched Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo to test how the search engines would rank pro-life topics. MRC researchers used a “clean environment” to search Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo for basic information about a pro-abortion study dubbed the “Turnaway Study.” The study ostensibly compared the social, psychological and financial outcomes of women who had undergone an abortion and those who were turned away due to the gestational age of their babies. Leftist media and abortion activists often tout that the study found that 95 percent of women in the group who underwent the abortions “feel that abortion was the right decision.” However, the study also found — inconveniently for those pushing the pro-abortion message — that 96 percent of women in the group who were unable to get abortions did not regret having their baby.
When MRC researchers searched Google for the terms “study women did not regret having baby” on October 20, Google buried the pro-life results at the bottom of the page as the twenty-fifth and twenty-seventh results. Results at the top of the page referenced other parts of the problematic study. For example, Google’s first result is an article from the University of San Francisco, where the turnaway study was conducted. “Five Years After Abortion, Nearly All Women Say It Was the Right Decision, Study Finds,” the headline read. The article made no mention at all of the 96 percent of women who did not regret having their baby.
Bing and DuckDuckGo, however, not only found articles from Life Institute about the pro-life statistic from the Turnaway Study but they brought that article right to the top of their respective results. The impact of where a result is ranked on the page cannot be overstated. The first result is most likely to be clicked on and few users click on links that don’t appear on the first page of search results, according to Brian Dean, a search engine optimization expert. Dean conducted a study analyzing how often users click on various rankings of Google search results. His blog, Backlinko, reported that “the #1 result in Google has a 10x higher [Click Through Rate] compared to the #10 result.” He also noted that less than 1 percent of “Google searchers clicked on something from the second page.” An older study conducted by SEO software company Moz in 2014 reported that the second page receives only 3.99 percent of clicks, indicating that the problem has worsened over time.
"Whether it’s censoring key Senate races, pro-free speech platforms, COVID-19 wrongspeak or former President of the United States Donald Trump, Google's leftist bent is clear," said MRC Free Speech America Director Michael Morris. "So it should come as little surprise that Google's pro-abortion agenda is trumpeted loud and clear also. ‘By their fruit, you shall know them.’ In Google's case, the fruit is obvious: evil."
The platform has repeatedly been loud and clear about its stance on abortion.
Methodology
For its most recent search results study, MRC Free Speech America analyzed the Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo search results for the terms “study women did not regret having baby” on Oct. 20, 2022.
MRC Free Speech America conducted these searches in a clean environment. A “clean environment” allows for organic search to populate results without the influence of prior search history and tracking cookies.
MRC Free Speech America researchers searched the terms “study women did not regret having baby” using the algorithm. To determine bias, our researchers looked at each search engine’s results and recorded the rankings of each result.