Nearly 50,000 activists have signed onto a petition asking Pandora to pull advertisements for Bethany Christian Services, an anti-abortion organization that pressures women to continue their pregnancies. The feminist group UltraViolet, which is spearheading the online effort, says the music service needs to stop “running ads that prey on pregnant women.”
Bethany Christian Services runs a pregnancy hotline that allows women who are facing an unplanned pregnancy to call 1–844-UCHOOSE if they need help deciding what to do next. Although those women likely assume that Bethany’s counselors will present them with their full range of reproductive options — which is reinforced by the word “choose” in the hotline number itself — the organization is actually a biased source of information. Its website misconstrues abortion as a risky medical procedure, and downplays it in favor of adoption services. For more information on abortion, Bethany’s website directs women to the American Pregnancy Association, another group that has ties to a wide network of anti-choice organizations.
This week, after UltraViolet sent out its initial action alert, one of its members called the hotline to ask about an abortion. According to her account of the incident published on the blog LadyClever, the woman on the other end of the line responded, “I don’t counsel toward abortion. We do not offer abortion. It is not our preferred choice.”
That’s why these type of hotlines are actually considered to be arms of the “crisis pregnancy center” (CPC) movement. CPCs are clinics that present themselves as medical facilities, but don’t actually offer any health services and ultimately seek to dissuade women from choosing to end a pregnancy.
“It’s such an obviously bad fit for Pandora’s users and listeners,” Karin Roland, UltraViolet’s organizing director, said in an interview with ThinkProgress. “It’s putting these lies right in their ear buds where they’re literally forced to hear it unless they want to give up the service. Pandora can do better, and we can stop one area where this misinformation is being spread.”
Crisis pregnancy centers, which now outnumber abortion clinics across the country, are strategic players in the anti-choice agenda. They began proliferating in the 1980s and 1990s with the specific goal of convincing women to reject abortion. There’s a large body of research that has documented the misleading tactics that CPCs use to reach these vulnerable individuals — including lying about birth control’s effectiveness and shaming women for being sexually active. A recent Congressional report found nearly 90 percent of CPCs spread blatant misinformation about the potential risks of ending a pregnancy.
“They’re commonly referred to as crisis pregnancy centers, but we actually prefer to call them medical fraud centers,” Roland said. “They’re predatory organizations that deliberately mislead women. The more people know about what’s really happening, the more people are saying that this isn’t even a political issue — this is just flat out wrong. To masquerade as a medical center and feed flat out lies to women who are desperately looking for options, well, it’s ridiculous that it’s allowed.”
That’s why reproductive rights groups have recently been able to successfully pressure other companies to stop accepting online ads from CPCs. Earlier this year, similar activist pushes led Yahoo and Google to agree to drop the right-wing groups. Groups like UltraViolet and NARAL Pro-Choice America pointed out those advertisements violated those tech companies’ terms of services, which specifically forbid content that’s false or misleading.
Pandora’s website does not make its own guidelines for advertisers immediately apparent. When ThinkProgress reached out to the company for clarification, a spokesperson responded, “The appearance of an organization’s advertisement on Pandora is not an indication that Pandora endorses or shares the views of a given organization. Our ads are screened to ensure that they are not false, misleading, fraudulent, inaccurate, unfair, or containing gross exaggeration.”
Roland says that CPCs don’t fit that definition. “They have no place on Pandora’s air waves,” she said. “Our members have been pretty outraged to know that these music service that many of them love, and want to continue using, is allowing these ads.”