Kerry Nettle (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to debate the Pregnancy Counselling (Truth in Advertising) Bill 2006 and to have worked with all of the other cosponsors of the bill. This is an important piece of legislation for entrenching honesty in the way in which organisations relate to the public. We all want people to be honest and that is what sits behind the basis of the laws in this country that do not allow people to advertise in a deceptive or misleading way. We all want to see some honesty in the way in which people relate their services to the public.

The cosponsors of this legislation have put it in place for incorporated entities right across the board to ensure that we have that honesty so that when people see an advertisement they know what services they will get. But we have a loophole. This legislation seeks to close that loophole. I am proud to be a part of trying to close a loophole that exists in our current legislation which enables people to be dishonest in the way they advertise. Unfortunately, we are seeing some pregnancy counselling organisations taking advantage of the loophole that exists in our legislation.

The reason why this legislation is so important is that, when those organisations do take advantage of the loophole that exists in the current legislation, it is women who suffer. Women with an unplanned pregnancy want to find support when making a really difficult decision about what they are going to do about their unplanned pregnancy. They want to be able to find support and, when they see a pregnancy counselling service advertised—in the yellow pages, in the newspaper, or wherever—which says it will provide them with the information they need that will help them make a decision, that is what they want and expect. This legislation is about ensuring that that happens.

I want to talk a little about the impact on women with an unplanned pregnancy, their families and supporters when pregnancy counselling organisations take advantage of the loophole that exists in our legislation and when they are misleading and deceptive in the way in which they advertise. I went to visit the Pregnancy Advisory Centre in South Australia, which is a government funded service which provides pregnancy counselling to women with an unplanned pregnancy. It is a great service. They provide information to women about all three options that women can pursue when they have an unplanned pregnancy. I spoke with them about some of the phone calls that they have been receiving. At the centre, they get an opportunity to see what happens to women when these women read one of these false or misleading advertisements, then ring up a service and get something totally different from what they had expected. I want to give some examples that the centre staff told me about, the experiences that they had had and of the women whom they had spoken to.

The mother of a pregnant 13-year-old woman rang the service that had advertised as a pregnancy counselling service to get some information regarding options for her daughter. She was told that if her daughter adopted out her child then it would be the worst thing that she could do. She was also told that if she terminated the pregnancy, ‘Well, that’s just killing the baby.’ It is not support for the mother of a 13-year-old who has an unplanned pregnancy to tell her that if her daughter terminates, ‘That’s just killing the baby.’ That is not pregnancy counselling; that is not support. She was told that there would be support for her daughter to keep the baby, such as cots and baby clothes. She was also told that the government would provide a few thousand dollars to keep the baby. This service is funded by the federal government, and it was advertising itself as being able to provide support to women with an unplanned pregnancy. That is not support to the mother of a 13-year-old with an unplanned pregnancy. That is what this legislation is trying to stop, to ensure that mothers like her do not have to experience that kind of disservice when they ring up to get support.

Again, a woman rang a service advertising itself as providing pregnancy counselling. She mentioned in the conversation that she had had an abortion. She was told, ‘I think you should name your baby.’ How is that providing any kind of support or genuine pregnancy counselling for a woman who rings up to talk about a medical operation that she has had only to be told, ‘I think you should name your baby.’ She was also told that her baby did not have a place in heaven. She was asked whether she thought what she had done was sinful. That is not support; it is not pregnancy counselling. An organisation that provides that kind of disservice should not be advertising itself as a pregnancy counselling service. This legislation is about ensuring that Australian women can have honesty reflected in the advertisements that they read.

It is not just about Australian women; it is also about men. The father of a 16-year-old girl from regional Australia rang up a service—again, one advertising that it would provide pregnancy counselling—when she was five weeks pregnant as a result of having been raped. When he suggested pregnancy termination as an available option for his daughter—which, clearly, she had; there are three options, and one of them is a pregnancy termination—the person at the other end of the telephone called him a murderer for stating that there are three things that you can do when you have an unplanned pregnancy pregnancy: the first is a termination, the second is continuing on and becoming a parent and the third one is to have the child adopted. He mentioned one of those three options and he was told by the person at the other end of the phone that he was a murderer.

That is what we want to prevent occurring—for the father of a 16-year-old girl in this instance. I think that the father of that 16-year-old girl has the right, when he looks it up in the yellow pages, to know whether or not the service that is advertising itself as doing pregnancy counselling is actually going to be able to provide him and his daughter with support. This is a deliberate strategy being taken by particular pregnancy counselling services. To give you an idea of how deliberate it is, I want to tell you about some research that has been done in the United States by right to life organisations. One piece of research was done in 1988. It was called Turning hearts towards life. There was another lot of market research done in 2005. What that research was designed to do was to find out how best these right to life organisations could advertise their services in order to get women who had an unplanned pregnancy to ring them without realising that they were a right to life organisation. That was the intention of the research: to find out how best they could advertise their service to mislead and to deceive women about the service they were providing. What they found in that market research was that they should put themselves under ‘Pregnancy’ in the phone book and that they should talk about being free, low-cost, confidential, caring, friendly, non-judgmental, professional, trained and able to see people quickly. These were all important things.

These were all things that women wanted. But that was not why these organisations were doing the market research; they were doing it to find out how best they could advertise things that women wanted but exclude what they were actually not providing to women—that is, information about one of the three options that women can pursue when they have an unplanned pregnancy. The research told them that they needed to be careful about what they said and that if they put the word ‘options’ in their advertisement then some women may pick that up as being an indication that they were pro choice—that they thought women should have access to the whole range of reproductive rights and look at all of the options when they had an unplanned pregnancy. What they were looking for in their research was the answer to this: ‘What do we not put in the advertisement, because if we put it in the advertisement then people may be able to determine what our particular perspective is?’

I think it is really important when we have this debate to say, ‘We’re not talking about just anyone looking in the yellow pages and trying to find a particular service.’ This is not like trying to find where the nearest squash court is. We are not talking about somebody in that headspace. What we are talking about here is somebody who is in crisis; somebody who is extremely vulnerable. This is somebody who has just found out that they are pregnant or that one of their friends or family members is pregnant and it was not planned. Some people will be wildly excited because they thought they could never get pregnant and they have found out that they are pregnant. For other people it is going to be really frightening because it was not part of their vision for their life or for their future. They are in crisis and they really want to be able to get support. They really want to access someone who can go through with them what their options are—what they are thinking, what their values are and how they going to put in place the big life decision that they are being asked to make at that point. These are people who are in crisis. When you are in crisis you need clear information to make sure that, in the jumble of your confusion about what you are going to do, you are not misled. You need clear information.

I will give you an example. Ms Brigid Coombe, the Director of the Pregnancy Advisory Centre in South Australia, gave this example when she appeared before the Senate committee into this legislation at the hearing in South Australia. I will read her words. She said:

I would like to give you an example of how easy it is for women to misinterpret information describing services on the 24-hour pages. I spoke with a woman at the centre last week who had rung Pregnancy Counselling Australia. As you will note on the White Pages, there it states, ‘Alternatives to abortion and post-abortion counselling.’ I asked her why she had rung them given that their entry states, ‘Alternatives to abortion’. She said she saw the word ‘abortion’ and in her anxious state thought, ‘That’s what I want,’ and rang them.

She needed clear information but she saw the word ‘abortion’ and, in her anxiety, jumped to a conclusion and rang that service. When she rang that service she was given inaccurate and alarming information. She then went to a gynaecologist in a hospital, where she was reassured with accurate information and given information about the counselling service provided by the South Australian government. She was able to get some support to make a really difficult decision.

I want to give that example because, as I said, we are not talking about someone trying to find the nearest squash court; we are talking about somebody who is perhaps not thinking as clearly as they might otherwise because they have in front of them a really difficult life decision. This is something that they did not expect and they need assistance to get through it. As we have heard other people mention, a lot of women are able to make their own decision: in fact, 75 per cent of women who have an unplanned pregnancy are able to decide which of the three available options they are going to choose.

The women who most need pregnancy counselling are those who do not have support networks around them or who feel that they need more information or who need some reassurance about making their decisions. The people who are uncertain about which of the three options they should choose are the ones who are riffling through the yellow pages to find where they can get some support. It is precisely the most vulnerable of the women with unplanned pregnancies who are the ones looking through the advertisements to try to find out if they can get the service that they want.

What this bill says is that those advertisements should be clear about what kind of service they are going to get. It is a simple, straightforward request. Let us be clear about what people are going to provide. As I said before, I thought everyone here agreed with the concept of people being honest about what kind of service they are providing. That is what this legislation is about. It says, ‘Let’s be honest about what kind of service is going to be provided when somebody rings up that number.’ That is not currently the situation because we have got this loophole in our legislation. But that loophole is proposed to be shut by the bill we are debating today.

I spoke to a group of students at the University of Sydney some time ago about the different types of pregnancy counselling services out there and what kinds of experiences women had had when ringing some of those pregnancy counselling services. I told them, as I have just now told the Senate, about some examples where people rang up expecting to get support and found that the phone had been answered by a ‘right to life’ organisation. They were told that they would be a murderer and that they had sinned. They were told to name their baby. The consequence of that for that woman—or for the friend or family member who rang—was disastrous. When I was talking to the students at the University of Sydney they asked me: ‘How do I find out? How do I know whether or not a pregnancy counselling service is going to provide me with genuine information?’ I had to say to them, ‘Well, there is no law that requires those pregnancy services not to mislead or be deceptive in their advertising.’

It was partly as a result of those conversations that I produced out of my office a Greens guide for pregnancy counselling, which I have distributed to many different youth centres in my state. I have also distributed it to women’s health centres, which is where people go to find this information. The guide outlines which are the genuine pregnancy counselling services and which are the deceptive and misleading ones that will not provide women with information—let alone a referral—about one of the three options that they can choose when they have an unplanned pregnancy. But it should not be the case that a young woman with an unplanned pregnancy has to go into the youth centre to see a guide that enables her to determine which services are genuine or not. She should be able to see that in the advertisement. That is why we are proposing this piece of legislation.

It is an issue that other countries have had to deal with as well. In New York, just last year, a Republican member of parliament introduced a piece of legislation called the Stop Deceptive Advertising for Women’s Services Act. It was designed to deal with precisely the same issue that we are dealing with here today. She wanted to ensure that American women would see advertisements for pregnancy counselling services that were honest about the services that they provided. That is what the four women from the spectrum of the political parties are doing today. They are trying to ensure that Australian women who see advertisements for pregnancy counselling services will know that those advertisements are honest. That is what we want, and that is why we want it. We want it because it is in the best interests of not just women but everyone for services like this to be honest in their advertising. That is why this bill is important. It is extremely important if we value things like honesty, and I do value honesty. That is why I support this bill and why I am very proud and pleased to be standing here commending this bill to the parliament. I say that if we care about Australian women and their friends and families we need to support this piece of legislation that is before the parliament today. (Time expired)