The strategy of using abortion-related keywords to send a woman searching the web for abortion information to a nearby crisis pregnancy center is already a few years old. But the scheme only received real national attention a couple of months ago, when Siri, Apple’s new voice-activated search assistant, was caught sending women looking for abortion clinics to centers that specialize in talking women out of abortions.

Apple refuted accusations of an anti-abortion agenda, instead blaming the “glitch” on search engines like Google and user-generated guides like Yelp, from which Siri largely extracts its information.

Apple’s explanation matched claims made by anti-abortion rights groups, whose websites describe in detail how they use keywords and Google ads to direct abortion seekers to a central website called Option Line, whose primary function is to route people to one of the thousands of crisis pregnancy centers throughout the country.

The Siri scandal sent The American Independent on a search for evidence that anti-abortion activists are successfully thwarting abortion searches on the Web. We found that CPCs have a minor presence online, but what’s telling is not so much the quantity of CPC ads that appeared on each front-page Google search, but the subtle, universal messaging these sites use.

In many cases, the presence of an anti-abortion agenda is masked.

Searching ‘abortion’

Like most businesses trying to boost their visibility on Google, anti-abortion pregnancy centers buy ads through Google’s AdWords program. But at the heart of the strategy appears to be CPC websites that not only share a universal message, but also a universal Web design.

Using various Google search approaches – “abortion,” “abortion services” “how can I get an abortion,” “I need an abortion” – TAI discovered at least one ad or entry that was linked to Option Line or to Option Line-created software on each primary search page.

These pages often also included two or three entries for individual crisis pregnancy centers or anti-abortion websites. One search result turned up a list of “abortion services” in the D.C. area that included anti-abortion pregnancy centers.

A Google ad that popped up frequently during our searches is “Thinking of Abortion?” whose URL is listed as assistcpc.org. The ad links to the website for Assist Pregnancy Center, a CPC in Annandale, Va. At the very bottom of the website is a note: “Website created by Optionline e-Xtend.” This links to Option Line Extend, a website development program that provides pregnancy centers with “a professional Internet presence.”

Another Google ad titled “Abortion Stories” links to the website standupgirl.com, whose domain is owned by Oregon Right to Life. The site is mainly devoted to promoting pregnancy and hosts an Option Line chat service on its homepage.

Option Line is a 24/7 live-operator contact center headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, which fields inquiries from people seeking information about abortion and pregnancy. It has a Spanish-only version at estasembarazada.com, staffed by bilingual consultants.

Option Line was co-founded in 2003 by Care Net and Heartbeat International, two of the three largest CPC networks in the U.S. About half of the more than 4,000 centers across the country are affiliated with one of these two networks.

In 2007, Option Line created Option Line Extend to sell to centers affiliated with either Care Net or Heartbeat International. CPCs are charged $150 for “basic websites,” $300 for “premium websites” and $500 for “ministry websites.”

Care Net, which made about $7 million in revenue in 2010, reported spending $600,000 on Option Line. Heartbeat International, which reported making about $1.4 million in revenue (PDF) in 2010, reported spending about 46 percent of its budget on its Option Line program between October 2010 and September 2011.

The Option Line Extend model websites are designed with calm colors and messaging, a departure from anti-abortion websites like AbortionNO.org (whose domain is owned by the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform), which links directly to a graphic video of a fetus being aborted.

Aside from live-chats and directions to the closest CPC, Option Line offers answers to questions about abortion, birth control and emergency contraception.

In an answer to the question, “Should I take the morning-after pill?” Option Line replies:

Many times women panic after having unprotected sex and rush to take the morning-after pill (Plan B One Step® or Next Choice®). However, you can only become pregnant on certain days of the month — around the time that you ovulate. Taking the morning-after pill during a time when you cannot become pregnant needlessly exposes you to large doses of hormones.

If you are already pregnant from an earlier sexual encounter, taking the morning-after pill is of no value and may cause harm6^, 7. To find out if you are pregnant, contact us, and we’ll connect you with a caring, qualified pregnancy center near you.

Questions about abortion are answered in similarly sober tones. Potential risks from abortion — often overstated by anti-abortion activists and CPC counselors — are stated here as what they are, potential risks. For example, while activists often argue that abortion is a direct cause of breast cancer, here the link is presented as uncertain. Option Line is also careful about putting disclaimers at the bottom of some of its pages, stating that its centers do not offer certain services, but this message is does not always appear on individual center sites.

Creating diversions on the Internet

According to a recently released updated report (PDF) on crisis pregnancy centers produced by the Family Research Council, Option Line averages about 1 million visitors per year and makes about 20,000 contracts per month, with media partners such as Heroic Media and Online for Life.

Last September, The American Independent reported that Heroic Media, an anti-abortion media group headquartered in Austin, Texas, was employing what’s known in the industry as “landing pages” or “doorway pages,” which Google defines as “poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase … written to rank a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination.”

The single destination where Heroic Media was trying to funnel users was Option Line’s homepage. Heroic Media’s parent company, Majella Cares, registered the Web domain freepreghelpline.com, which, when clicked on, goes to optionline.org/get-help.

Heroic Media discussed this strategy on its website when the Independent first reported the story.

This was an excerpt that we recorded from this page:

Internet keyword advertising is targeted and measureable. We can reach scared, abortion-vulnerable women with life-affirming messages and monitor effectiveness by the number of views, clicks, and visits to our site. We recently launched a new landing page at www.freepreghelpline.com to optimize reporting on just how many women are connected with life-affirming resources.

Keyword advertising on Google is also extremely cost-effective because you only pay for clicks, which cost an average of less than three dollars. That’s three dollars to connect abortion-vulnerable women with life-affirming information and people who can help.

A recent screenshot of the same web page we excerpted back in September shows that Heroic Media deleted the paragraph about freepreghelpline.com (also, the alleged amount of monthly “abortion” searches has jumped from 2 million to 6 million):

Screenshot from HeroicMedia.org, click to enlarge.

When asked if the organization is still using landing pages, Heroic Media spokesperson Marissa Gabrysch said the organization never used them.

“That’s inaccurate, although I understand why it was confusing,” Gabrysch told TAI in an email when asked about the doorway pages. “I have made the clarification on our website. Heroic Media’s keyword ads for Option Line link directly to optionline.org.

“The freepreghelpline.com site has not been advertised through keyword ads,” she continued.

In its current draft, House Bill 5134 mandates a “physician or qualified person assisting the physician shall orally screen the patient for coercion to abort and domestic violence using the screening tools developed by the department.”

If a patient discloses coercion to abort, the physician must:

• Inform the patient that coercing a woman to have an abortion is illegal and grounds for a civil action under which “she may receive financial compensation for her damages.”
• Postpone the abortion for at least 24 hours after coercion has been disclosed.
• If a patient under 18 discloses domestic violence or coercion to abort, the physician must report the situation to a local Child Protective Services office.
• The facility providing abortions must conspicuously display information about violence against women.

This bill is part of broader legislation dubbed the “Coercive Abortion Prevention Act,” (CAPA)  which was introduced in June in the forms of HB 4798 and HB 4799. The act makes “coercion to abort” a crime punishable by potential imprisonment and fines up to $5,000, or $10,000 if the individual accused of coercing the pregnant woman is the “putative father of the unborn child” and 18 or older, or if the pregnant woman is under 18.

Under this law, “coercion to abort” includes threatening to discontinue financial support, threatening divorce, assault or threats of physical violence.

Right to Life Michigan has pushed for this legislation in the last three legislative sessions; it failed each time.

“These bills will give women the legal backing they need when being coerced to abort, and help prevent the tragedy of physical assault and murder of pregnant women,” said Right to Life Michigan in a brief on the legislation.

But reproductive rights and civil rights advocates in Michigan view the CAPA as deceptive.

Writes American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan Executive Director Kary L. Moss in a statement:

Supporters of this legislation laud this effort as a step to protect women who are victims of domestic violence. In reality, this bill is part of a larger agenda to deny women access to the full range of reproductive health services that they really need. Let’s be clear: No one should be coerced into having an abortion or having a baby. However, if the Legislature really cared about protecting pregnant women, lawmakers would put more effort and money into ensuring that women have the resources they need to avoid unintended pregnancies and that those who are victims of abuse can get meaningful help.

Ms. Magazine published a blog post in August condemning the “Coercive Abortion Prevention Act” as a way of coercing women and minors to carry pregnancies to term against their will:

As far as HB 4799 is concerned, threatening to divorce your wife unless she gets an abortion has a $5,000 price tag. Threatening to divorce her if she gets an abortion, however, is perfectly acceptable. In fact, the state itself is perfectly willing to participate in coercion against abortion; one lawmaker behind this bill is ironically also trying to force Michigan women to view the most clear and accurate ultrasound images possible before obtaining an abortion.

And to take the hypocrisy even further, Michigan happens to be a state with strict parental notification laws for minors seeking abortion. So while it could soon become illegal for parents to attempt to pressure their daughters into having abortions, it is well within parents’ legal rights to force their daughters to continue an unwanted pregnancy.

The final vote tally, for House Resolution 358, was 251-172, with 15 Democrats voting in favor of the bill and two Republicans opposing it.

While the representatives debated the bill early in the day, anti-abortion-rights organizations demonstrated in the Congressional Auditorium of the Capitol Visitor Center, where several women in various stages of pregnancy displayed their uteruses on a widescreen as a certified nurse conducted their ultrasounds. Among the women to undergo a public ultrasound was Mary O’Connor, an employee for Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pa.), the author of the Protect Life Act.

When the debate continued in the evening, Pitts defended his legislation, comparing the anti-abortion-rights movement to the civil rights movement. He suggested that if abortion had been legal before 1973, former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, writer Maya Angelou, and the recently deceased Apple founder Steve Jobs, all of whom were adopted, might never have lived.

In general, Republicans defended the legislation by arguing that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) was approved last year without language mirroring that of the Hyde Amendment — the source of a more than three decades federal-funding ban on abortions. Obama’s executive order to that effect has been deemed by the House GOP to be insufficient and alterable.

“Hyde only affects Labor/HHS programs, not the massive expansion of government-funded healthcare,” Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) said earlier in the day during the first half of the debate. “Thus ObamaCare, when phased in fully in November 2014, will open up the floodgates of public funding for abortion in a myriad of programs, including and especially in exchanges, resulting in more dead babies and wounded mothers than would otherwise have been the case.”

Democrats attacked Republicans for pushing legislation that attempts to restrict women’s access to abortion instead of focusing on jobs and the economy.

“This bill creates no jobs, it doesn’t help the economy and it inserts the federal government smack in the middle of [women's reproductive decisions],” said Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Calif.).

“The American people want the divisiveness to stop and the jobs to start,” Rep. Robert Andrews (D-N.J.) echoed.

Democrats also argued that that bill could put women’s lives at risk if they are refused abortion care in cases of emergency, a contention bill supporters disputed.

Abortion-rights advocacy group NARAL Pro-Choice America has dubbed the Protect Life Act the “Let Women Die” bill.

Following the bill’s passage, NARAL released a statement that reads, in part:

H.R.358 is part of Speaker Boehner’s ongoing agenda to attack women’s privacy and take away the right to choose.  This is the House’s seventh vote attacking choice since January. In February, the anti-choice leadership brought the government to the brink of shutdown over its obsession with defunding Planned Parenthood. In May, the House passed H.R.3 (a companion bill to H.R.358). These two bills made headlines earlier this year because they both included language that redefined rape to make it more difficult for sexual-assault survivors to access abortion care.  Boehner caved to public outrage on that issue, both bills still jeopardize women’s health.  Shockingly, H.R.358 would allow hospitals to refuse to provide a woman emergency, lifesaving abortion care, even if she will die without it.

To this end, Rep. Lois Capps (D-Calif.) attempted to amend the bill with a provision stipulating that health care workers be required to provide care to women in an emergency regardless of their personal beliefs on abortion. Capps argued that Pitts’ bill as written creates a loophole allowing health care workers to ignore the existing Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), which ensures public access to emergency services regardless of ability to pay. But her motion failed.

Obama has promised to veto the Protect Life Act if it makes it to his desk.

“For me, the right to life has never been political,” Boehner said.

Boehner, the first political leader to take the stage at the three-day conservative Christian conference, began speaking about jobs and the economy, telling the room of flag-T-shirt-wearers that it is time to “liberate our economy from the shackles of this government.”

But he switched gears to abortion politics soon after, eliciting strong reactions from the crowd when he accused the administration of using taxpayer dollars to fund elective abortions, a policy that is prohibited by the longstanding Hyde Amendment. Still Boehner called for the end of publicly funding abortions and said the House GOP was working on a bill to make permanent the Hyde Amendment.

“Beyond the life issue, we must defend the Defense of Marriage Act,” Boehner said, censuring the president for ignoring the “law of the land” and promising to take money away from the Department of Justice for refusing to defend DOMA.

This week, Boehner’s office announced it is raising a $750,000 spending cap to $1.5 million to former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement, who is defending the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

Senate Minority Leader Eric Cantor’s (R-Va.) speech followed the same blueprint as Boehner’s – jobs, abortion, same-sex marriage. He announced that a bill would be introduced next week to Congress that would “ensure no taxpayer dollars to abortion” and that would broaden so-called “conscience rights” to health care workers and pharmacists, to allow them to refuse abortion services and emergency contraception to women based on religious objections.

But what ultimately won Cantor a standing ovation was a proposal to “eliminate government funding for any and all organizations that perform abortions.” This effort – largely aimed at defunding Planned Parenthood, which receives more than $300 million annually for its family planning and reproductive health services – has already begun with the House’s recent introduction of a controversial Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies appropriations bill (PDF).

Abortion has already proved to be a star in this year’s summit, with every speaker addressing it in some form. Members of Susan B Anthony List are stationed throughout the Omni Shoreham Hotel handing out a joint voter guide introduced Friday by the SBA List and the National Organization for Marriage that list the anti-abortion/anti-same-sex marriage rights of the presidential hopefuls based on pledges they have signed.

Boehner and Cantor followed Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council Action, the lead sponsor of the Values Voter Summit. In his speech, Perkins introduced a theme that is likely to pervade the conference and how presidential candidates campaign for the support of the Christian voters in attendance.

Referring to a recent speech the President Barack Obama gave about values before the LGBT lobby the Human Rights Campaign, Perkins challenged the current president in his absence.

“Mr. President, you’re right, this is a contest of values. And I tell you what, this Marine has never backed away from a contest. … This election is too important to elect a Republican. We need to elect a conservative …”

The rest of his sentence was drowned out by roaring applause.

Stay tuned for more Values Voter Summit coverage from The American Independent.

Heartbeat is not just inviting any baby, but specifically babies born to women who became pregnant unintentionally and “chose life” instead of abortion. The point of the campaign is to send the message to Congress that, “Pregnancy centers are good for America”; however, the demands of the campaign are unclear.

“Heartbeat’s pregnancy centers serve women with unexpected pregnancies without any financial motivation,” said Heartbeat International spokesperson Virginia Cline in a statement. ”Our main objective is to provide women with the emotional help and practical resources needed to welcome a new life. This includes helping women to recognize their own inherent value.”

Between 2001 and 2006, more than $60 million in federal funds were given to crisis pregnancy centers, mostly through abstinence-education grants, according to a government report (PDF) commissioned by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and a 2006 Washington Post review of federal records.

Heartbeat International provides www.optionline.org to connect women to CPCs across the nation. As The American Independent recently reported, the anti-abortion-rights organization Heroic Media has been using “doorway” pages, a violation of Google’s policy, to divert women searching for information on abortion to Option Line.

Next week, the Capitol will be the setting for another anti-abortion-rights campaign, called “Voices From the Womb,” in which live ultrasounds will performed on pregnant women.

In response to accusations the U.S. House Energy & Commerce Committee’s upcoming investigation into Planned Parenthood (which was inspired by a report crafted by AUL) is “politically motivated,” AUL is championing the investigation as an issue of fraud, not abortion.

“The key here is transparency and accountability, which is a bipartisan issue,” said AUL President Charmaine Yoest when she appeared on MSNBC’s “Up w/ Chris Hayes” on Saturday. “We can all disagree about the issue of abortion … but the American people … don’t want to see their tax dollars going to subsidize abortion.”

Hayes and his guests argued with Yoest about the validity of AUL’s report and the organization’s own transparency and relationship with Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), the chairman of the House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee who launched the investigation last week.

“You want to see Planned Parenthood go out of existence,” Hayes told Yoest. “Why should we trust anything that you say about the organization, given the fact that we know you are bent on their destruction?”

Yoest responded that, annually, Planned Parenthood performs more than 300,000 abortions and receives more than $365 million in federal funding. “That’s a million dollars a day, Chris,” she said. “Aren’t you even the slightest bit curious as to what they’re doing with that money?”

Hayes informed Yoest that before the show, he contacted Lewis Morris, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general chief counsel, whom AUL cites in its report to support the idea that Planned Parenthood has committed fraud. In the quote AUL selected, Morris said that “[Medicaid] providers that engage in health care fraud may consider civil penalties and criminal fines a cost of doing business.”

Morris told Hayes’ staff AUL used this quote misleadingly because his testimony was about the Office of Inspector General’s approach to combat Medicare and Medicaid fraud and was not specifically about Planned Parenthood.

Hayes further accused Yoest of exaggerating the notion that Planned Parenthood is guilty of fraud:

Hayes: When you say there are four cases of [overbilling] on Medicaid, there are over 800 Planned Parenthood centers around the country, and these cases go back over the last decade and a half. What is the margin of error that you would find acceptable? How does this compare to other large providers of Medicaid services?

Yoest: Are you saying that that’s an acceptable margin of error when the American taxpayer is involved? Transparency and accountability is supposed to be a bipartisan issue.

Guest and New York Times Magazine writer Rebecca Traister suggested a detailed congressional investigation of Planned Parenthood’s audits dating back 20 years was perhaps itself a waste of taxpayer money.

“The kind of discrepancies … that you cite in your report have been turned up because [Planned Parenthood] is scrutinized so closely,” Traister said. “Isn’t that a tremendous waste to sort of redo a job that is done regularly?”

Yoest mentioned another highlight from AUL’s report, a supposed discrepancy between the amount Planned Parenthood claims it spent in 2010 and the amount reported by the Government Accountability Office.

In the report, AUL’s staff wrote: “How much money does Planned Parenthood receive from federal taxpayers? A 2010 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) demonstrates that even the federal government does not know the answer.”

This fall Politifact quashed this argument:

The GAO never reported that Planned Parenthood and its affiliates couldn’t find $1.3 billion. It simply said that Planned Parenthood spent $657.1 million. The GAO also didn’t say that there was any sort sort of discrepancy or that money was missing.

On Monday, AUL’s legal staff revisited the discrepancy claim and defended itself against Politifact:

[I]t should be noted that the AUL Report does not mention “missing money.” The AUL Report addresses, as the GAO Report confirms, the federal government’s lack of knowledge regarding how much federal funding Planned Parenthood receives. Whether or not Planned Parenthood knows how much federal money it receives does not negate that problem. In fact, the AUL Report calls for Planned Parenthood’s internal audits to be turned over to Congress, so that the lawmakers charged with overseeing these funds can exercise oversight of Planned Parenthood’s collection and use of federal funding.

Yoest told Hayes that AUL is looking out for the taxpayer, but as The Florida Independent recently reported, at last week’s crisis pregnancy center conference, AUL staff attorney Kellie Fiedorek said Planned Parenthood is being targeted as a part of a strategy to end abortion.

Both Stearns’ office and the House Committee on Energy & Commerce told The American Independent that there should no be extra costs associated with the investigation, as it will involve existing staff and resources.

“The cost and time should be minimal as long as Planned Parenthood has been complying with its legal obligations and cooperates with the inquiry,” Energy & Commerce committee spokesperson Debbee Keller said in an email. “As part of an ongoing effort to provide proper oversight of taxpayer dollars, Chairman Stearns is conducting a narrowly-focused investigation to ensure taxpayer dollars are being used as intended under federal law.”

When Hayes asked Yoest how closely AUL has worked with Stearns before he launched the investigation, Yoest would not answer the question.

“We talk to a lot of people on Capitol Hill every day, Chris,” she said.

Watch the entire segment:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

On Wednesday, Americans United for Life (AUL) launched the “We Support the Investigation of Planned Parenthood” online petition, which asks Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) — who launched the investigation based on a report AUL drafted in July — to stick to his guns, despite claims from colleagues that the Planned Parenthood investigation is politically motivated.

An excerpt from AUL’s petition letter:

Dear Rep. Cliff Stearns,

Thank you for your efforts to begin an investigation of the Planned Parenthood abortion business. As taxpayers, we are very concerned about having our tax dollars go towards an organization that has been rocked by scandal and is the largest abortion provider in the United States.

[...]

We are disappointed that your efforts to investigate these issues are facing opposition from Planned Parenthood and its supporters in Congress, like Reps. Henry Waxman and Diana DeGette, who are working aggressively to halt your probe. Please stand up to these efforts to silence your investigation.

We ask that you stand strong in your effort to make Planned Parenthood comply with your requests for documents related to its financial dealings, use of taxpayer funds, and how it reports on teenage girls who are  victimized by sex traffickers and sexual abusers. Do not let them back down in furnishing these documents to Congress so the American people can know about the actions of this organization that receives $363 million in taxpayer dollars every year.

As The American Independent sister site The Florida Independent reported, Planned Parenthood and representatives in Congress are fighting the investigation. Among PPFA defenders are Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who is calling the investigation “needless and politically motivated,” and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who recently said Stearns’ investigation is a “frivolous” and an “abusive witch hunt by Republicans” that is “an unconscionable waste of taxpayer dollars, and harassment of a trusted healthcare provider for millions of women and families in Connecticut and across the country.”

Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood is floating its own petition, as part of its “I Stand With Planned Parenthood” campaign:

Dear Representative Stearns:

[...] Your effort to discredit, damage, and weaken Planned Parenthood will only harm the women and families who rely on Planned Parenthood health centers for essential preventive health care. Focusing on attacking Planned Parenthood when millions of women lack access to basic, affordable health care just shows how far out of touch Congress is with Americans’ priorities.

I stand with Planned Parenthood just as they have stood with millions of American women. I demand that you abandon your baseless investigation, and do so now.

The Texas-based organization — best known for erecting controversial billboards with phrases such as, “The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb” – re-designed its website in late July, launching a new method of deterring women from getting abortions.

Heroic Media’s latest strategy involves manipulating Google search results by buying ads and filling them with abortion-related keywords that direct abortion-seekers to Option Line, a crisis pregnancy hotline founded by Care Net and Heartbeat International, the nation’s two largest networks of crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs). In March, Majella Cares, which parents Heroic Media and sister organization Life Always, registered the URL www.freepreghelpline.com, which is a single-page site that essentially serves as what’s known as a “landing page” or “doorway page,” and what Google defines as “large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase … written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination.”

At the top of the website is a prompt to enter a zip code; once entered, the user is taken to an Option Line page that lists crisis pregnancy centers located within that particular area. According to Option Line’s website, there are about 1,800 CPCs within the Option Line network.

The remainder of the FreePregHelp website consists of all-capped blue and green text, reading:

If you’re scared and worried… If your boyfriend freaked, if your parents are mad, then you’ve come to the right place[.] Love yourself. Forgive yourself. Then move on to the important stuff, like making a decision you can live with. One that can ultimately bring you peace and happiness. Now’s the time to talk it out. To know what your options are there are lots more than you might think [.] Listed above are people you can talk to and a website you can go to for more information, advice or direction. They’re confidential. No one will know. You don’t have to do this alone.

Heroic Media outlines its Internet Outreach strategy on its website:

Each month there are more than 2 MILLION Google searches for “abortion” nationwide. When a young woman turns to the internet for immediate, anonymous help, and she searches for abortion related terms, Heroic Media’s keyword advertisements are there to connect her with help and hope.

Internet keyword advertising is targeted and measureable. We can reach scared, abortion-vulnerable women with life-affirming messages and monitor effectiveness by the number of views, clicks, and visits to our site. We recently launched a new landing page at www.freepreghelpline.com to optimize reporting on just how many women are connected with life-affirming resources.

Keyword advertising on Google is also extremely cost-effective because you only pay for clicks, which cost an average of less than three dollars. That’s three dollars to connect abortion-vulnerable women with life-affirming information and people who can help.

For every $100 we invest in keyword advertising, around 30 women are connected with Option Line where they find the help they and their babies need.

As stated, the intention of the landing page is to funnel Internet users searching for “abortion” to Option Line, but the new strategy appears to violate Google’s policy. The search engine’s webmaster guidelines explicitly state that doorway pages are a violation of policy because they are considered manipulative and deceptive.

From Google’s doorway-page policy:

Whether deployed across many domains or established within one domain, doorway pages tend to frustrate users, and are in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines.

Google’s aim is to give our users the most valuable and relevant search results. Therefore, we frown on practices that are designed to manipulate search engines and deceive users by directing them to sites other than the ones they selected, and that provide content solely for the benefit of search engines. Google may take action on doorway sites and other sites making use of these deceptive practice, including removing these sites from the Google index.

For Google, it’s not about ethics, but search quality, a spokesperson said, adding doorway pages like www.freepreghelpline.com violate company policy.

“Sites sometimes violate Google’s webmaster guidelines in an attempt to game our algorithms and trick their way to the top of our results,” said Google spokesperson in an email. “If they succeed, this hurts the search experience for people coming to Google, because high-quality information gets buried by spammers and sites don’t get to compete on a level playing field. Our webmaster guidelines are designed to protect users, and when a site violates them, we reserve the right to take action to preserve a good user experience. This helps ensure that in the long run people can find the best possible search results on Google, and website owners can compete on a level playing field for traffic.”

Earlier this year, Google’s cloaking policy gained national attention following a New York Times investigation of JC Penney’s search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, which involved links to JC Penney from thousands of (often unrelated) websites, which in turn drove JC Penney to the top of Google searches for the most mundane items. As the Times, reported, Google found violation with the way in which the retail chain’s website was dominating the search results for everything from “casual dresses” to “horses.”

“We did pass all of the pro-life legislation that we thought was very important whether it be fetal pain, whether it be stem cell research, whether it be human cloning,” Zellers told Minnesota Public Radio. “A lot of these things we passed. Gov. Dayton vetoed those bills.”

Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life (MCCL) President Leo LaLonde sent a fundraising letter to supporters last week that lambasted Republican leaders for not pushing pro-life policies hard enough.

“[We] felt confident that House and Senate leaders would insist that at least some of our protective measures would be included in the final budget,” LaLonde’s letter read. “Senate Majority Leader Koch and Speaker of the House Zellers quickly struck a deal with Gov. Dayton, and in the blink of an eye all five pro-life measures that has been passed by nearly two-thirds, veto-proof margin during the legislative session were negotiated away.”

Zellers said the legislature passed the bills desired by pro-lifers, but that Dayton insisted the social issues not be included in the final bills.

The Life Protection Subfund was initially created in anticipation of legal challenges to a law that, among other provisions, requires a doctor to tell a woman who is about to have an abortion she “has an existing relationship with that unborn human being and that the relationship enjoys protection under the United States Constitution and under the laws of South Dakota.” (This month, an appeals court overturned the district court’s previous ruling that the “existing relationship” provision was unconstitutional but agreed to strike down another provision that required doctors to tell patients that women who have abortions are more likely to commit suicide.)

Now the Subfund is being used to defend this year’s currently-blocked anti-abortion-rights bill that mandates a 72-hour waiting period for abortion seekers and requires counseling at a crisis pregnancy center (CPC). According to funding data provided to The American Independent by Paul Kinsman, commissioner of the South Dakota Bureau of Administration, which oversees the Protect Life Subfund, the fund currently contains $63,387.04.

About $12,000 of that $63,000 was carried over from 2006 donations ranging from $5 to $2,000, half of which were from South Dakota residents or companies. In total, South Dakotans paid for about two-thirds of what was in the fund in 2006.

As of Sept. 26, about $48,000 in donations have gone to the Subfund in 2011. Two-thirds of those donations have come from six other states: Colorado (two donations), Massachusetts, Minnesota, Ohio, North Dakota (two donations) and Texas. The majority of those funds were donated by individuals, except for Patrick Davis Consulting in Colorado ($100), the Gerard Health Foundation LLC in Massachusetts ($2,500) and the North Dakota branch of the Knights of Columbus ($100).

The largest contribution – $25,000 — came from just one source, married couple Joseph and Cynthia Brinck.

From the Leader:

Only one Joe Brinck is listed in Ohio phone directories, and he is CEO of Stelter and Brinck LTD, a manufacturer of industrial process heat equipment and president of Superior Thermal Ltd., a manufacturer’s representative agency selling industrial-gas burners and controls, according to company websites.

Joe Brinck also is on the board of directors of an organization he founded, Ruah Woods. Its mission is to restore family and renew the culture using Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, according to the organization’s website.

Under Joe Brinck’s biography on the site, he states, “My businesses belong to Jesus, and we state so in our corporate minutes and our mission and vision statements. We use our businesses to evangelize our employees, customers and suppliers. We use the profits to support pro-life organizations.”

Even though the money in the Subfund does not come close to covering the state’s court costs -– according to the Argus Leader, the South Dakota attorney general’s office estimates legal challenges to this year’s anti-abortion-rights law could cost between $2 million and $4 million -– the attorney general has not dipped into the Subfund because of help from anti-abortion-rights organizations such as Alpha Center, a CPC in Sioux Falls. And even though the money has yet to be used, the existence of the fund remains controversial.