It’s become much more challenging for pregnancy resource centers to advertise on Google and Yelp, with the latter even requiring consumer alerts notifying searchers that pregnancy resource centers do not provide abortions. Trudden said Heartbeat International hasn’t been able to advertise its abortion pill rescue network on Google since the platform deemed it “misinformation” in 2021. Much of this opposition comes from outside groups pressuring companies like Google and Meta, according to Baker.

Vulnerable Women are at risk from “extremists” who exploit technology to track and target them, says Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon. Wyden issued that dire warning earlier this year in a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). He urged the agency to protect consumers from the “outrageous conduct” of a now-bankrupt data broker that cooperated with one of these so-called radical groups.

The group in question? A pro-life marketing company called the Veritas Society. It used a digital strategy called geofencing to serve life-affirming ads to the cell phones of women who visited abortion facilities. Wyden claims the tracking involved 600 Planned Parenthood centers across 48 states.

Although geofencing is a common digital marketing strategy, pro-lifers leveraging the technology around abortion facilities face increasing pushback from both privacy advocates and pro-abortion lawmakers. They argue the practice violates patients’ rights and could even be used to prosecute women seeking abortions across state lines. But the marketers behind these campaigns say they’re just putting to good use the same tools available to everyone—and that political outrage reveals the growing push to squelch pro-life messaging online.

In the early 2000s, Jon Reames was just getting his start in the marketing world, helping TV and radio stations build their audiences. It was a bracing time in the industry. YouTube was still in its infancy, and a Harvard sophomore had just launched something called “TheFacebook” from his dorm room.

At the same time, a revolutionary type of location-­based advertising called geofencing was taking root, harnessing the recently minted GPS capabilities of smartphones to send targeted ads directly to phone users based on places they’d recently visited.

Geofencing uses the GPS signals most smartphones have running in the background—usually from something like a weather app with location tracking enabled. Advertisers can then draw a virtual “fence” around a specific area to capture the signals that enter it.

Geofencing has been mainstream in the marketing field for at least the last 10 or 15 years, Reames said, and is “very widespread” among companies today. Auto dealers might geofence a competitor’s location and serve ads for their own vehicles to potential car buyers. A restaurant might geofence a nearby mall to entice hungry shoppers.

Seven years ago, Reames left a successful career to start his own company, A Nice Guy Marketing, where he has helped a variety of churches and nonprofits promote their visions using this technology.

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