AUSTIN, Texas (LifeSiteNews) — A federal judge refused to step in and save business review platform Yelp from a lawsuit by Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton for labeling pro-life pregnancy centers with “inaccurate and misleading language,” finding insufficient evidence to determine that Paxton filed the suit in bad faith.
At the end of last September, Paxton’s office filed a suit against Yelp, which is openly pro-abortion, accusing the company of having “appended language to all pregnancy resource center Yelp pages, indicating that those pages ‘typically provide limited medical services and may not have licensed medical professionals onsite.’ That disclaimer is misleading and often untrue because pregnancy resource centers frequently do provide medical services with licensed medical professionals onsite. Moreover, when informed by pregnancy resource centers that this statement was untrue, Yelp left up the misleading disclaimer on those centers’ Yelp pages until reproached by Attorney General Paxton earlier this year.”
This, the Lone Star State’s top prosecutor argues, violates Texas’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act.
Yelp responded at the time that Texas was “tak(ing) issue with a truthful consumer notice that hasn’t been used on the Yelp site for over six months, won’t be used again, and which was helpful in informing consumers about crisis pregnancy centers,” whereas Paxton’s office had previously conceded that Yelp’s current notice on crisis pregnancy centers is an “accurate description.” The state maintains that Yelp “remains liable for penalties and other relief for the duration of its unlawful behavior” and must be prevented from ever repeating the offense in the future.
Yelp also filed its own lawsuit seeking to block Paxton’s, but has now been rebuked by U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson, Live Action reported.
“To be clear, the court is not convinced that Paxton acted entirely in good faith in bringing this case against Yelp; still, Yelp has not provided enough concrete evidence of his subjective motivations to prove otherwise,” Thompson wrote. “Though he brought the case after Yelp filed in this court, he had advised Yelp that he might sue one week before Yelp filed. And Yelp has not pointed to concrete evidence of Paxton’s desire to rebound from his near-impeachment or to curry favor among Texas voters. Nor has Yelp pointed to a history of harassment from Paxton.”
“Yelp cannot mislead and deceive the public simply because the company disagrees with our state’s laws,” Paxton reacted to the news. “I’m pleased that the court agreed with Texas that Yelp’s federal lawsuit was a frivolous attempt to avoid enforcement for misleading consumers.”
Crisis pregnancy centers have long provided low-income women with a wide variety of services, including ultrasounds, basic medical care, adoption referrals, parenting classes, and children’s supplies that help mitigate the fears and burdens that lead some to choose abortion. For that reason, they have long been a target of left-wing rage, with attacks often focusing on claims that they deceive women, both about abortion and about their own services. But the pro-life contentions most often derided as “misinformation” are in fact true, and accusations of self-misrepresentation typically refer to little more than the fact that ads for them appear in online searches for the term “abortion.”
Left-wing hostility to crisis pregnancy centers drastically intensified when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe, which triggered the activation of numerous state laws that forced scores of Planned Parenthood facilities across the country to shut down. Pregnancy centers became the targets of violence, vandalism, and threats, and politicians, including President Joe Biden, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer calling for new limits on their funding, speech rights, and very existence.