Concerns about Meta banning posts and adverts for women’s healthcare and wellness products on Facebook and Instagram have returned to the fore, following US President Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January, 2025.
Some abortion pill services in the US recently reported that some of their Instagram and Facebook posts had been blurred, blocked or removed from the platforms and that some of their accounts were suspended before being reinstated.
Other companies selling health products, such as home-testing products and period pants, have recently complained about having their content restricted.
In 2022 the US Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v Wade court ruling that protected US citizens’ right to have an abortion. Trump has said that he will not sign a nationwide abortion ban ruling, saying he will leave it to individual states to set abortion rules.
Democrats have accused the President of not protecting women’s rights. 12 US states have banned abortion, with more states placing legal limits on mail-order abortion pills.
Nonprofit abortion pill service Aid Access told the New York Times [paywall] that since November, the month of Trump’s election win, some of the organization’s Facebook and Instagram posts were removed or blurred. Aid Access’s accounts on both platforms were blocked and then later restored.
Women Help Women and Just the Pill, two other abortion pill providers, said their Instagram accounts were suspended in January, before being restored. Meta’s explanation for these bans was that the accounts didn’t “follow our Community Standards on guns, drugs and other restricted goods.”
Meta told the New York Times that some of the abortion pill-related social media incidents were related to rules about sales of drugs without certification. The company added that some incidents were down to “over-enforcement”.
The company said that any issues with the abortion-related accounts were not related to Meta’s recent decision to drop fact-checking on Facebook.
Wider healthcare censorship lingers
For years, healthcare and wellness companies have complained about social media and other big tech companies allegedly censoring their content.
In 2022 business research group the Center for Intimacy Justice highlighted how products and services such as pelvic floor muscle devices and menopause services were banned on Facebook. There were complaints about alleged “double standards”, with some male sexual health product adverts being allowed on Facebook while some female-focused products were banned.
In 2025 the issue lingers. Vaginal microbiome test company Daye recently reported that one of its adverts, featuring a pregnant woman wearing a crop top, was banned for featuring “Adult Nudity and Sexual Activity”.
Meta’s response pointed to an issue with algorithms rather than a crackdown on health products. The Daye advert was reinstated and a Meta spokesperson told Cosmopolitan: “No system is perfect and sometimes we make mistakes, but we’ll use this to retrain our system.”
Fiona Dunleavy, global brand director at pelvic floor training device company Elvie, told Cosmopolitan: “A recent creative ad of ours that featured a woman biting her lip and scrunching bedsheets with the caption ‘confidence never felt so good’ for our pelvic floor device, Elvie Trainer, was not allowed to run, but we see very explicit adverts for erectile dysfunction running as paid ads, including phrases such as ‘have longer sex’.”
In 2024 issues like these led to Clio Wood, who runs well-being and fitness retreats, and FutureFemHealth newsletter founder Anne O’Sullivan to launch a campaign against women’s health social media censorship called CensHERship.
“This censorship happens across all social media platforms (and elsewhere in the digital and financial world). It silences and suppresses brands, educators, charities and content creators,” they wrote.
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