In this edition of The Wired Practice video, originally published for MedPage Today, Vanguard CEO Ron Harman King discusses the restrictions by Google Ads & Meta for reproductive healthcare services and other threats to public health.
Watch the video on MedPage Today
By Ron Harman King, MS, JD, CEO
Restrictions by Google Ads & others on reproductive terms threaten public health
Not long after the presidential inauguration weeks ago, my coworkers began having odd encounters with Google Ads. The tech mega giant rather suddenly started rejecting our attempts to place advertising on its search engine about topics such as human reproduction, in vitro fertilization, and infectious diseases.
These are the kinds of ads that we’ve placed and managed for more than a decade in our work to promote public health information. They link to information we publish on medical practice websites about topics ranging from achieving a healthy pregnancy to overcoming infertility, to research into an HIV vaccine.
This is information that the scientific and medical communities resoundingly view as vital to maintaining good health and even saving lives.
Curiously, the same information is readily available through Google searches on federal government websites and the websites of such revered healthcare legends as the Mayo Clinic. But while Google helps you find the info through what’s called organic internet search, it mysteriously doesn’t want ads leading you there — even if it would make money to do so.
We market healthcare & legal practices
For three decades, Vanguard has helped healthcare practices gain ongoing growth in new patients. Now we’ve expanded our marketing for professional services to law firms – offering the same growth guarantee in our LawMarketLink program as in our MedMarketLink program.
Google blocks new ads about reproductive health
In a call with our Google service representative, we learned that Google would allow us to continue IVF-, pregnancy-, and reproductive-related ads under existing Google accounts, but no new accounts or new campaigns would be permitted.
When we asked why, the answer was simply, “It’s company policy on birth control.”
Birth control. You heard that right. You’d think the brilliant tech minds at Google could distinguish between birth control and birth creation.
The best detail I could find on Google’s inexplicable advertising policy was on its webpage explaining its sensitive-interest guidelines The page states, “we don’t allow personalized advertising on … [s]uch personal hardships [including] health conditions, treatments, procedures, personal failings, struggles, or traumatic personal experiences.”
The policy itself isn’t new. For the last year or two, Google sometimes without warning suspended the ads we manage. However, prior to 2025, we were able to get them restarted by contacting our rep. Not this year.
Google Ads Keyword Planner: “All keywords were removed”
That’s not all. Suddenly — again without notice, warning, or explanation — whenever we now use what’s called the Google Keyword Planner to learn the volume of internet searches for terms such as “intrauterine insemination,” “endometriosis,” and “polycystic ovary syndrome,” the online tool returns the message: “All keywords were removed.” This has occurred for 72 reproduction-related search phrases we’ve tried using.
In other words, move along, folks. Nothing to see here.
Oh, and we don’t want to “exploit [people’s] personal struggles,” as Google says in its policy.
Funny thing about that stance: A 2024 report co-authored by the Center for Countering Digital Hate and MSI Reproductive Choices found that both Google and Meta — the owner of Facebook and Instagram — have restricted access to reproductive health information in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, while enabling misinformation and abuse.
Google & Meta restrict factual info on abortion but allow anti-abortion misinformation
The report alleged that the pair of tech behemoths have restricted access to useful information about abortion services while failing “to address anti-abortion misinformation and abuse directed at local reproductive health partners.”
(As an aside, it’s fair to note that in 2016 a British regulatory watchdog agency reported that 10 MSI-operated clinics in the United Kingdom had failed to adequately train staff and in some cases failed to obtain informed consent from patients.)
Nevertheless, congressional Democrats have urged the Federal Trade Commission to investigate a 2022 report that Meta turned down ads from dozens of women’s reproductive health groups advocating sexual health for women while allowing those for men.
Of course, in response to the glare of the spotlight, Meta updated its rules to include more examples of permissible ads such as for family planning and “pain relief during sex.”
Is ad censorship and a new president coincidental?
So why drag the new president into this? It’s entirely likely that the timing of Google’s ad censorship was entirely coincidental with the appearance of Google CEO Sundar Pichai at the presidential inauguration Jan. 20, along with Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, X owner Elon Musk, and Amazon chief Jeff Bezos.
And maybe it’s sheer coincidence, too, that a week later Meta agreed to pay $25 million to settle a Donald Trump lawsuit against it for suspension of his Facebook account following the January 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. And that the Bezos-owned Washington Post announced less than 2 weeks before the election that it would not endorse a presidential candidate in 40 years, most likely to Mr. Trump’s advantage.
Call me a crazed conspiracy theorist if you like. But there are a growing number of dots to connect here.
Connecting the dots on health information restrictions
Google has more than 80% of market share in internet search. Elon Musk’s X platform has 540 million monthly users. Meta, TikTok, and Google-owned YouTube collectively claim 9 billion monthly users worldwide — more users than there are humans on earth.
Two weeks before the election, Meta announced plans to end its fact-checking program. Musk jettisoned the guardrails on X against misinformation and disinformation in October 2023. The same month he directed 150 million followers to two X accounts notorious for promoting egregious lies, including one posting antisemitic attacks.
Endangering public health with Orwellian decisions?
These men — yes, they are all men — control an immense chunk of global information. And they are cozying up to a politician who has bragged about ending constitutionally protected abortion rights, reduced access to birth control, suggested bleach injections as a possible treatment for COVID-19, issued executive orders reviving some anti-abortion policies, nominated the nation’s most famous anti-vaxxer as chief health officer, weakened protections for Medicaid enrollees, and reversed the Biden administration’s cost reductions on prescription drugs.
There’s not one scientifically or medically trained professional among them. Are these the world’s best arbiters of what makes good science and life-enhancing and life-saving information? Or are we veering toward the most unimaginable Orwellian catastrophe?