Abstract

This project integrates Reproductive Justice (RJ) commitments with insights from networked misogyny to describe the digital coercion strategies of Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs) for people living in rural areas in the United States. Abortion access is increasingly mediated by commercial search engines (Mejova et al., 2022). The authors analyzed public CPC marketing strategy documents against data from over three hundred search queries across seven states with large rural populations. Taking Google search results as rhetorical artifacts, data reveals that states with restrictive abortion laws empower CPC search result visibility in several ways. CPCs disproportionately impact people who are the most reliant on internet mediation for abortion access—a population sharing significant overlap with people living in abortion deserts in rural areas.