Russian Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko has called for changes to search engine algorithms so that abortion-related queries surface links to family support centers before anything else.
“So that when you type in the search bar looking for clinics where you can get an abortion, the first results that come up are information about family support centers […] and only then the websites of those clinics, including information about what an abortion entails and its health consequences,” Matviyenko said at a meeting of the Presidential Council on the Implementation of State Demographic Policy.
Matviyenko urged IT companies to back her proposal, “because every child’s life saved is already a great victory.”
In recent years, Russia has launched a broad campaign to restrict access to abortion. Private clinics in a number of regions — including the Sverdlovsk, Kursk, and Nizhny Novgorod regions, Tatarstan, and occupied Crimea, as well as more than 10 other regions — have fully or partially stopped providing abortion services.
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