Amid lawsuits, is Meta trying to protect minors from abortion content?

According to a report from Mother Jones, leaked Meta documents reveal that the company's AI chatbots are now prohibited from discussing a multitude of topics with minors, including abortion. The news comes amid pending lawsuits regarding Meta's alleged failure to protect children.

Key Takeaways:

• According to leaked documents from Meta (the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp), the company has blocked its AI chatbots from giving certain information to minors, including abortion advice.

• Pro-abortion groups are complaining, urging Meta to treat abortion as a form of health care.

• Meta came under fire last year for allegedly failing to protect minors from online predators and is facing lawsuits over the matter.

The Details:

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, has blocked its AI chatbot from discussing certain topics with minors — offering advice on abortion. According to Mother Jones:

Internal Meta documents obtained by Mother Jones, containing a comprehensive list of policy guidelines for Meta's chatbot interactions with users under the age of 18, shed light on how the company is training its chatbots to respond to children's questions on issues ranging from sexual health to suicide and self-harm, eating disorders, and other mental health issues.

A Meta spokesperson told EWTN News, "Our AIs are trained to engage in age-appropriate discussions with teens and to connect them with expert resources and support when appropriate.

“They provide factual information on sexual health but refrain from offering advice or opinions. We continuously review and improve our protections so that teens have access to helpful information with default safeguards in place.”

As of September, Meta has been blocking "content that discusses, describes, enables, encourages, or endorses sensual acts, sex acts, sexual arousal, or sexual pleasure” with teenagers — topics that are discussed quite frequently by Planned Parenthood.

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If a teen asks about suicide or self-harm, the chatbots will now redirect them to mental health resources.

The bots also aren't supposed to give children "content that provides advice or opinion about sexual health." This includes "anatomy and physiology of reproductive organs, puberty education, menstrual health, fertilization and reproduction, STI and HIV prevention, contraceptive methods, consent education and abstinence" or teach teens how to use condoms or period products. The chatbots are also prohibited from talking to teens about abortion or giving abortion advice.

According to Mother Jones:

The policies explicitly ban providing information “that helps a user obtain or carry out an abortion (such as “You can go to Planned Parenthood to get an abortion”), or providing users with locational information that could be used to obtain abortions. It also prohibits the chatbot from providing a “value judgement” for or against abortion. 

What We're Hearing:

While this is a positive move to protect minors from exposure to harmful behaviors, pro-abortion groups are less than thrilled about the new Meta chatbot guidelines.

Martha Dimitratou of Repro Uncensored, a global network of "reproductive health organizations," considers the move to be a form of censorship, and complained that Meta more than doubled its removal of sexual and abortion-related content between 2024 and 2025. She also said it has removed content related to the LGBTQ community and sex worker-led initiatives. This is despite Repro Uncensored attempting to sway Meta's content for years, according to Mother Jones.

Dimitratou admitted that Repro Uncensored has been urging Meta to "consider abortion as health care and direct to accurate health care resources."

Mother Jones said the group wants Meta to be "treating abortion-related and reproductive rights content in the same way it treated Covid-19 — including by proactively correcting misinformation — but that Meta has 'categorically said that this is not a priority.'"

What pro-abortion groups deem to be "misinformation" about abortion is really just factual information about fetal development and how abortions are carried out.

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Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, a technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a pro-abortion group that defines digital privacy and free speech, is also unhappy with the Meta chatbot rules.

He said it is concerned that "... Meta is willing to provide extra sources for eating disorders or suicide, but not willing to provide information about Planned Parenthood or where to get more information about safe abortions.” 

And this is the problem with allowing pro-abortion groups to reign over abortion-related content:

• Abortion groups, especially Planned Parenthood, have a financial interest in convincing minors to participate in risky sexual behaviors, because it helps to build their clientele.

• By creating trust with minors, Planned Parenthood can create clients for its birth control, STD testing, STD treatment, and other sex related services, as well as future abortions.

• Pro-abortion groups depend upon the fact that teens will continue to be their customers.

A spokesperson for Meta responded to the comments from pro-abortion groups:

Our AIs are trained to engage in age-appropriate discussions with teens, and to connect them with expert resources and support when appropriate. They provide factual information on sexual health but refrain from offering advice or opinions. We continuously review and improve our protections so that teens have access to helpful information with default safeguards in place.

Zoom Out:

Meta had come under fire after being accused of and criticized for allowing minors to flirt with its chatbots, allowing them to receive sexual information from the chatbot, and allowing access to self-harm content.

"Sensual chats"

Reuters uncovered a Meta policy document last year that allowed chatbots to hold "sensual" chats with kids, and gave minors false medical information.

The Meta standards at the time said it is "acceptable to describe a child in terms that evidence their attractiveness" and to tell a shirtless eight-year-old that "every inch of you is a masterpiece — a treasure I cherish deeply."

At the time, Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the company was revising the document, and admitted that these types of conversations with minors should never have been deemed acceptable. He told Reuters:

“The examples and notes in question were and are erroneous and inconsistent with our policies, and have been removed. We have clear policies on what kind of responses AI characters can offer, and those policies prohibit content that sexualizes children and sexualized role play between adults and minors.”

Failure to protect from predators

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued Meta last year over allegedly failing to protect children from online predators. The case involves an undercover operation in which the state's Justice Department posed as an underage girl on Facebook.

A 47-year-old man sent private messages to the fake account with explicit photographs and spoke about having sex with her. Torrez said Meta knowingly put children at risk of sexual exploitation. In fact, the 47-year-old man had his accounts disabled in 2021 when it was discovered that he was a registered sex offender, but he operated 15 other accounts.

And he's not the only one.

Court documents revealed that Meta's own internal testing found that one of its chat products that had not been released failed to protect minors from sexual exploitation about 70% of the time.

“Meta has allowed Facebook and Instagram to become a marketplace for predators in search of children upon whom to prey,” New Mexico argued.

Additional lawsuits are also pending.

The Bottom Line:

It seems Meta is now making good on its promise to revise what chatbots are allowed to discuss with minors, but whether or not the revisions are implemented properly remains to be seen.