Ruth Webber (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to start my contribution by commencing where Senator Stott Despoja did, and that is by congratulating the co-sponsors of this important piece of legislation, the Pregnancy Counselling (Truth in Advertising) Bill 2006, and by expressing the wish that the cross-party work between women in this place continues. In the five years that I have been a member of this place, one of the things that I have enjoyed most has been working with the other women in this chamber, no matter which political party they belong to. I particularly want to congratulate my good friend Senator Carol Brown for assisting in bringing this important piece of legislation forward today.

A report in the 23 April 2007 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine showed further evidence that neither induced nor spontaneous abortions were associated with an increased risk of breast cancer in premenopausal women. This followed a 2003 international expert panel convened by the National Cancer Institute, which reviewed and assessed research regarding reproductive events and the risk of breast cancer and concluded that, based on existing evidence, induced abortion is not associated with an increased risk of breast cancer. Obviously this is very good news for the many women who experience terminations and miscarriages.

But there are still some pregnancy counselling services who insist on telling vulnerable women that they risk breast cancer if they have an abortion. Were they to charge for this supposed service, they would be in clear breach of the Trade Practices Act. But, because they provide this service for free, there are no legal methods of preventing them from exploiting vulnerable women or punishing them for making false and dangerous claims to those women. That is the very reason that I rise to speak today on this important piece of legislation.

There has been a lot of talk recently about Australian values. I am sure that all of us in this place are largely in agreement that at the very least Australians value honesty, freedom and a fair go. We are generally of the view that the best person to make decisions about how to live is the person whose life it is—that is, after all, the basis of a free society. But people cannot make informed decisions if they make them on the basis of misleading or false information. That is why we prosecute companies who make false claims in advertising a product or mislead people about the nature of the services that they are paying for—and that is all we are attempting to do here today. We are making sure that when a woman is faced with an unplanned—some say unwanted or difficult—pregnancy she is able to choose the service that is most relevant for her.

Some providers have tried to claim that they choose to outline the risks of abortion in the interests of providing full information so that women can make a fully informed decision. On the surface, this sounds like a reasonable claim, but a quick look at the websites of these agencies shows how this argument has been twisted. Looking at sections on continuing a pregnancy, you will see a discussion about the possible effects on a woman’s life—on her educational and employment concerns, her feelings about her family and the father of the child and her feelings about becoming a mother. There is no talk about the many risks associated with pregnancy and childbirth, including—rarely, I admit—death, and nor should there be. These are issues for her to discuss with medical professionals and not with telephone counselling services.

However, click on the pages concerning abortion and you will find mountains of statistics and talk of steel instruments and infections in an attempt to scare women out of considering a relatively safe procedure—indeed, safer than childbirth. If abortion is as dangerous and damaging as these false providers believe it is, they should not need to resort to misleading women. If they are genuinely interested in educating women, they should be honest enough to provide women with information about the many health risks that come with pregnancy also, no matter how small those risks are.

Some claim that this bill seeks to prevent anti-abortion providers from continuing in their role. This is simply not true. Many women have never considered and would never consider terminating a pregnancy. They do not need a service that will discuss that option. Genuinely pro-life organisations can continue to help these women by providing support and comfort, whether those women choose to keep their baby or put it up for adoption. But many women are open to all options—examples of which have been discussed earlier today in this chamber—because the pregnancy they are concerned about is unplanned. They are therefore genuinely undecided. These women need to know that the service they ring or visit is open-minded and honest and will not judge or coerce them into making a particular decision. All this bill requires is that services that do not meet this description not pretend that they do. Is that so much to ask?

A woman’s time is just as valuable as her money, in my view, and she does not need to have either of them wasted by misleading advertising. I do not believe that this is too great an imposition on any provider. But, more importantly, the right of providers to attract women to their service by whatever means necessary must not override a woman’s right to make decisions based on facts—not on lies and deception—whether that decision is in choosing the provider to speak to or whether or not to proceed with her pregnancy.

I would like to make it very clear that there are many pro-life agencies that provide a compassionate and high-quality service to many women. They do not try to mislead women and trick them into using their services. They rely simply on being very good at their job of counselling women who are experiencing difficulties. There are also some very vocally anti-choice organisations that make it clear that they oppose abortion and want to dissuade women from that option. I do not necessarily agree with their views and am happy to debate their arguments with them, but I am also happy to acknowledge that they are very clear in their motives. But not all agencies are respectful of a woman’s ability to make choices about her health and her future. Some agencies use language that, to someone like me, is very obviously code for anti-choice agencies; but to a woman who is unfamiliar with these tactics it may sound very welcoming and compassionate.

For instance, at the moment in the Perth yellow pages there is an ad for an agency that says:

Are you pregnant? Alone? Needing Help? Need someone to talk to? Confused? Scared? Not sure what to do? For 24 hour assistance phone the Pregnancy Help Line—

and it gives you the phone number and then it says:

and speak to someone who cares.

Not once in that ad is it disclosed that that agency will try and actively dissuade you from choosing one of the three options, it will not refer for one of the three options and, in fact, it will behave in the way that I have alluded to earlier. It will say such things as ‘if you choose abortion as the option, you may never have any more children, as there is an increased risk of infertility; you will get breast cancer’—and the lies go on. Not once in that ad is it made obvious that that service provider does not and will never support one of the three options.

However, if I were a young and vulnerable 16- or 17-year-old woman, and fortunately I am not, and were to read that ad, I would presume that words such as ‘needing help’, ‘want someone to talk to’ and ‘confused’—‘confused’ particularly—meant that you were going to canvass the full range of options about the decision I had to make in a non-judgemental, non-directive way. However, at the moment when agencies like that say to vulnerable young women, ‘We don’t support you having a termination; if you do, you’ll get breast cancer, you’ll never carry a pregnancy to full term,’ and other ridiculous statements, there is nothing we can do. Because vulnerable young women do not pay for that counselling, that agency cannot in any way be prosecuted for its misleading, deceptive and cruel behaviour towards them.

If people in this chamber think this is not an issue that we should be concerned about, that it is all quite clear and people should be allowed to behave like that, as Senator Carol Brown said earlier, it would seem that even the yellow pages publishers themselves no longer agree with that view. They seem to think there is something going on out there and that people are being a bit deceptive. They are concerned that people who use their phone directory to find a particular service are able to find the service that is right for them.

If that were not the case, why else would Sensis themselves go to the trouble of placing an ad right at the front of ‘Pregnancy Counselling & Related Services’ in every edition of the yellow pages published this year throughout Australia that says:

We recommend that you fully understand the type of service each organisation offers before you contact them.

How are we meant to understand the full type of service that each organisation offers when they published ads like the one I have mentioned:

Are you pregnant? Alone? Need someone to talk to?

How are we to get an understanding from that ad that this service automatically dismisses one of the only three options available to young women? It is deceptive, but there is nothing we can do about it. Even if some of the other speakers in this debate do not agree with my view on that, it would seem Sensis themselves actually do.

To pretend that there are providers out there who try to trick women out of continuing with their pregnancy, as has been alluded to by Senator Fielding, is an absolute nonsense. To imply that there are only two kinds of provider—one that pushes abortion, and one that pushes pregnancy—is ridiculous and offensive to providers on all sides of the debate. Indeed, there are quite clear ads in the Perth yellow pages from providers that actually do provide abortion. Those ads are very clear. They say they will refer. Some of them do not actually advertise in the counselling section; they advertise in the abortion section—unlike what Senator Fielding was alluding to—because they actually provide the service.

In coming to this debate, we must separate our own very personal views about abortion from the issue at hand. The issue at hand is the need of pregnant women to be provided with a supportive environment that respects their decision-making abilities. That is all we are asking for today—for respect for decision making and open and transparent advertising by those that advertise those services.

It is a pity Senator Fielding is not still here. During his contribution earlier I was saying to someone that I did not actually recall Senator Fielding being at all of the committee hearings into the first draft of this legislation. So it is interesting that he has a view about the conduct of the entire inquiry and how it was carried out. I will concede that from time to time things did get a little bit heated—on both sides of the debate; not just in what people perceive as my side or Senator Fielding’s side. Sometimes they did get a little heated and I did not envy the job of the chair in dealing with those issues. But I do not recall him being there for all of the hearings—