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Women’s health is at risk around the world due to Google’s algorithm blocking critical online information about abortions, activists have warned.
Women on Web, which provides abortions around the world, saw the number of visitors to its site drop dramatically after Google changed the way its algorithm worked.
The abortion provider, which connects women with doctors who can distribute abortion pills in countries where termination of pregnancy is illegal, saw 80% of its website visitors disappear overnight in May 2020, when Google changed the way its search tool worked.
Women on Web told The Independent that the organization has since failed to restore most of its visitors; in December last year, it received only 30% of the requests to the site it had in early 2020.
Venny Ala-Siurua, executive director of Women on Web, said: We had 50,000 visitors a day and then 10,000 visitors a day in May last year.
It’s disheartening because we know that the people who come to us are already discriminated against in person in services or cannot access services at all. These inequalities are perpetuated online. People are facing the same obstacles on the internet.
Abortion is banned in a significant number of countries around the world, which means that women are routinely forced to risk their lives by resorting to dangerous abortion on the back roads.
In nations with the strictest laws, abortion is even illegal when the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest, or in the case of fatal fetal abnormalities, the abortioner faces life imprisonment.
Google rolls out regular updates to its algorithm in an effort to deliver more relevant content to people who type in search queries.
But, Ms. Ala-Siurua said: That May update aimed at pandemic-driven health disinformation, but that update also decided that the content we were providing no longer spoke to the search queries of people who needed it. abortions.
It is a small group of people who decide what goes into the algorithm. In our opinion that group of people is not representative of the women who use Women in Web. People who update the algorithm are very disconnected from the people affected by the updates.
Ms Ala-Siurua expressed concern that the groups’ abortion services were affected at the same time that demand for abortion via online services increased during the pandemic.
This all happened when services like ours were the most needed, he added. During the pandemic, it is so vital that people have access to services that do not require physical contact or travel. Pandemic pressure on health systems has also led to deprioritizing sexual and reproductive health.
She noted an increase in women accessing their abortion services when the Covid crisis hit, followed by a steep drop after the Google algorithm change, as she said the group is forced to continually consider how the technology chain it will affect your service provision.
The guardians of technology are making the internet less open
Venny Ala-Siurua, executive director of Women on Web
Women on Web receives thousands of emails and requests for help every month, and its multilingual support service provides reserved help for people with unwanted pregnancies. The service has enabled more than 100,000 people to access abortion by post and has responded to more than a million emails in 25 different languages over the past 15 years, Ms. Ala-Siurua said.
When our website was demoted, the services that replaced us at the top of Google search were large formal and established government services, Ms. Ala-Siurua added. We all have access to more information online since the pandemic, but the gatekeepers of technology are making the internet less open.
In countries around the world with highly restrictive abortion laws, Women on Web is often the only safe and convenient way to access abortion, yet Google is directing women to government websites that don’t show them how to find services for abortion.
Having a medical abortion involves taking two tablets, with health professionals claiming that the pills have less negative consequences than acetaminophen.
A woman living in Croatia who used the services of Women on Webs said: I am so happy and relieved that everything went so fast and worked out safely and I would like to tell other women who are in my situation not to worry. Doing it at home without people judging like in the hospital is such a relief … and peaceful for women.
It’s the best way to do something so traumatic, he added.
Another woman living in Northern Ireland said that: At 43 with two small children aged 7 and 11, living on benefits, having a child right now would put a strain on me and my existing family. .
The opportunity to take advantage of this service has therefore had a far-reaching positive impact on all concerned and I am very grateful that this service exists for someone like me.
The World Health Organization had previously estimated that a woman in a developing country dies from complications caused by a clandestine abortion every eight minutes. An estimated 25 million unsafe abortions occur worldwide each year, the vast majority in developing countries, and abortion is a major factor in maternal mortality worldwide.
Women on Waves, a non-profit organization of doctors and activists, is the sister organization of Women on Web. Founded by Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, it has flown drones filled with abortion pills and distributed safe medical abortions and reproductive health services via sea in international waters.
A Google spokesperson told The Independent: Major updates are designed to increase the overall relevance of our search results.
We have learned that sites that demonstrate authority on a topic are less likely to post false or misleading information, so if we can build our systems to identify signs of those characteristics, we can continue to provide reliable information.
Designing these systems is our greatest defense against low-quality content, including potential misinformation, and it’s a job we’ve been investing in for many years.
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