Texas is suing Yelp over a consumer warning. The consequences could reach much further.
Search Yelp for “pregnancy care” and you may encounter a crisis pregnancy center (CPC)—an organization that may advertise as a full-service clinic but does not provide abortions or referrals to abortion providers. Yelp labels these listings accordingly.
Now, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is weaponizing its consumer protection law to sue the company over an earlier, since-withdrawn nationwide notice that said crisis pregnancy centers “typically provide limited medical services and may not have licensed medical professionals onsite.” This under-the-radar case will test how far a state may reach when a national platform posts information that disagrees with state officials.
Yelp updated the notice for CPC listings in February 2023 after the Paxton threatened to sue the company. The new notice simply reads, “This is a Crisis Pregnancy Center. Crisis Pregnancy Centers do not offer abortions or referrals to abortion providers.” Paxton still chose to sue Yelp over the wording in the original disclaimer, even though Yelp had removed it.
A state trial court initially dismissed the case for lack of personal jurisdiction over Yelp, a California-based company. In October 2025, the 15th Court of Appeals reversed that ruling, concluding that Texas courts have specific jurisdiction over the company. Yelp asked the Texas Supreme Court to review the jurisdiction question, but the court declined, kicking the case back to the trial court for consideration on the merits.
No Texas court has yet decided whether Yelp’s notice violated the consumer protection law.
Yelp has not hidden its position on reproductive rights. Its CEO Jeremy Stoppelman was one of many corporate leaders who decried the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade …
Yelp first posted its notices in the chaos following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in June of 2022. Anticipating the ruling, states like Texas had enacted trigger bans outlawing abortion automatically upon the highest Court’s decision. The bans had their intended effect, and the state’s last abortion clinic closed in March of 2023, months before Ken Paxton’s lawsuit against Yelp. People searching for information about abortion in Texas could easily be directed to one of the hundreds of crisis pregnancy centers in the state without realizing it.
For example, the Yelp listing for a Texas CPC reads: “White Rose Women’s Center is a Dallas abortion counseling clinic providing free confidential counseling about pregnancy, adoption, abortion, free pregnancy tests, & abortion alternatives” and “Need help with your abortion? We’re here for you.” While a user might easily be confused about whether they can get an abortion at White Rose (they can’t), Yelp gives clarity with its disclaimer.
Yelp has not hidden its position on reproductive rights. Its CEO Jeremy Stoppelman was one of many corporate leaders who decried the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, and the company belongs to the Don’t Ban Equality Coalition, a group of businesses of all sizes in all 50 states who advocate for abortion rights as a workforce healthcare issue. The company’s position on abortion does not answer the question of whether Yelp’s factual notice misled or deceived consumers.
Yelp argues Paxton brought the lawsuit to punish the company for its reproductive rights advocacy and to score points with his political base after barely surviving impeachment. Paxton says the case is a straightforward effort to protect Texas consumers from misleading information in the disclaimers. The merits of those competing claims have not yet been adjudicated.
Yelp also points to a conspicuous source of support for its original wording: The Trump administration’s own Moms.gov website similarly notes that most pregnancy centers offer limited medical services.
Yelp argues Paxton brought the lawsuit to punish the company for its reproductive rights advocacy and to score points with his political base after barely surviving impeachment.
The Yelp lawsuit is part of Paxton’s broader use of litigation to advance Texas’ restrictive abortion policy. He intervened in Texas resident Kate Cox’s effort to obtain an abortion after she learned she had a nonviable pregnancy, and a court held that the state’s abortion ban could not block her access. Despite the court order, Paxton threatened hospitals with criminal prosecution if they treated Cox. She was forced to flee the state.
He also sued to block federal guidance requiring hospitals to provide stabilizing emergency care when that care could include abortion. Yelp opposed Texas’ position in the latter dispute. The company joined other businesses, the U.S. Women’s Chamber of Commerce and the Small Business Majority in an amicus brief at the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that Idaho’s strict ban should not prevent access to emergency medical care.
In recent years, Texas and other states have sharply increased public support for crisis pregnancy centers that oppose abortion and contraception and seek to persuade pregnant women not to have abortions. Many provide ultrasounds and pregnancy tests despite operating outside key regulatory structures that govern traditional medical clinics, even though they receive significant state funding. Texas allocated $140 million to its Thriving Texas Families program for 2024-25 and increased the program’s budget to $200 million for 2026-27. Recent investigations have uncovered significant waste and a lack of oversight, raising questions about the state’s management of that spending.
Some CPCs have a history of misleading the public about the services they offer. Last summer, the Center for Reproductive Rights (where I work) urged Paxton to investigate whether a CPC had violated Texas’ Deceptive Trade Practices Act (DTPA), the same law he used to sue Yelp. A CPC in Texas advised its visitors that any data they provided would be protected by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), even though HIPAA protections don’t apply to most CPCs because CPCs don’t bill insurance companies for their services. Visitors to this CPC may have provided their personal health data under the false assurance that their privacy is protected by federal law.
In other states, CPCs have faced scrutiny from consumer advocates. A watchdog group in New York recently urged state officials to investigate whether some centers improperly represented their ability to diagnose ectopic pregnancies.
Massachusetts warns residents that CPC advertising may obscure the services available at these centers. A woman there sued a CPC, alleging that it failed to recognize her ectopic pregnancy after giving her reassuring ultrasound results.
The free-speech implications extend beyond abortion politics. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a nonpartisan nonprofit that defends free speech across the political spectrum, supported Yelp’s position on the jurisdiction question. The organization filed an amicus brief in the case, warning the Texas Supreme Court that allowing states to claim jurisdiction over an out-of-state, online speaker could expose online publishers to litigation wherever their content can be viewed and “could impose a profound chilling effect on online speakers.” Although the Texas Supreme Court declined review, that underlying question remains important.
Texas enacted its consumer protection law to safeguard Texans from deceptive business practices like false advertising. The irony here is that Texas is invoking that law against a platform for warning consumers about the limitations of organizations presenting themselves as sources of much-needed pregnancy care.
The eventual merits ruling will determine whether Yelp’s original notice was deceptive or whether Texas is stretching a consumer protection statute to censor protected speech intended to provide consumers with relevant information. Consumer protection laws should protect people from deception, not be used as part of a political agenda to police a company’s speech. Allowing this kind of misuse opens the door to retaliatory censorship and threatens freedom of expression for nationwide platforms.
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A note from Ms. editors: We want to hear from you for The Majority, a new campaign collecting stories about how reproductive freedom has enabled readers to build the lives they want and need.
Poll after poll shows a majority of Americans support reproductive healthcare access. Yet public debate overlooks the lives shaped by abortion access, contraception, IVF, miscarriage care, maternal healthcare or comprehensive sex education—countless women who chose to pursue an education, have children, not have children, protect their health and chart their own future. What’s your reproductive freedom story? Add your voice. Together, these stories will help show not only why reproductive freedom remains a majority value, but also what it makes possible.
