Putin orders search engines to steer women seeking abortion information toward ‘social support’ programs instead
Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered the government to draft proposals for changing search engine results on abortion-related queries, according to a list of presidential instructions.
Under the instructions, search engines would have to display sites offering “social support to women facing a reproductive choice” before other results when users search for information about abortion.
Valentina Matviyenko, speaker of the Federation Council, the upper house of Russia’s parliament, made a similar proposal in May 2026, calling for search engines to change their algorithms so that links to family support centers would appear before abortion-related results.
“So that when people type in the search bar for information about clinics where an abortion can be performed, information about family support centers would appear first, and only then the websites of those clinics, including information about the risks of abortion and its health consequences,” she said.
Russia has waged a broad campaign to restrict abortion access in recent years. Among other measures, private clinics in 19 regions of the country have stopped performing the procedure altogether.
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