Selling abortion: update
A revised broadcast advertising code will force anti-abortionists to make their dangerous bias clear:
We pro-choicers were happy to note that the BCAP's just-closed consultation on a revised advertising code included a proposal to allow abortion providers to advertise abortion services on radio and TV.
Equally cheering was the news that the code would include this new rule (11.11 in the code):
'Advertisements for post-conception pregnancy advice services must make clear in the advertisement if the service does not refer women directly for abortion.'
BCAP's argument - rightly - is that there ain't time to waste if you're thinking of getting an abortion: the longer you leave it, the riskier the procedure is likely to be (the BCAP reference is the renowned 2004 Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists' paper on abortion safety and standards).
In other words - you need to know immediately if the ad you're seeing is for a provider who offers balanced, accurate, post-conception information and abortion (or a referral for one) if that is what you want, or if you're about to be drafted by an outfit that hopes to pull one back for Jesus Christ by neglecting to mention safe, legal abortion is available, and pumping you full of romantic notions about the realities of an unwanted child.
'We support [the referral rule] in that context of making accurate and balanced information available,' Abortion Rights chair Ann Henderson said when she and I spoke about 11.11 last week. Henderson felt that young people and women who didn't speak English well were particularly vulnerable to post-conception services and counsellors that did not explain all options (in its 2004 report, the RCOG recommended that special arrangements should be put in place for non-English-speaking women, to make sure they knew safe, legal abortion was an option).
The RCOG is hardly alone: in its 2007 review of scientific developments relating to the abortion act, parliament's science and technology committee identified the dangers of advertising that omitted to mention the abortion option, and recommended that 'the government consider ways of ensuring that all those claiming to offer pregnancy counselling services ... indicate clearly in their advertising that they do not support referral for abortion.’
The now-legendary John Bercow took up that call - he tabled an amendment to last year's third HFEB reading that would have made misleading advertising on abortion an offence. Unfortunately, his amendment died with all liberal HFEB abortion act amendments when Labour lost its bottle (and remembered its relationship with the DUP) in October 2008. You can read that sorry story here.
To the rest of the broadcast advertising code - which, as it stands, indirectly bans TV ads for categories of family planning centres, through its ban on ads for commercial services that offer individual advice on personal problems.
BCAP proposes to relax that restriction for providers that can prove suitable credentials. Its aim is to 'fulfill two policy objectives: to allow post-conception pregnancy advice services the freedom to advertise [a freedom that the time has long been right for - the public overwhelmingly supports legal abortion] and to ensure that ads make clear whether the service refers women for abortion.'
I'm quietly confident of pro-choice victory, me. If anything is going to knock the Lord and the pro-life moral minority out of the picture, it'll be man's religious desire to flog advertising space. Once there, promotion of abortion services becomes a very simple matter of finance. If abortion providers can afford TV advertising, they'll be able to engage in it. End of story. Abortion will be identified as the safe and legal service it is, and sold as such. The assumed, opportunistic sensitivities and staged outrage of the likes of Nadine Dorries will be neither here nor there.
SPUC sees that point, and is frightened of it. Earlier this year, national director John Smeaton whined to the Guardian about a code that "threatens to further commercialise the killing of unborn children," [for all the world as though seeing abortion as a transaction was a problem] and that the proposed code would mean 'agencies with a financial interest in abortion will be in a position to buy expensive broadcast advertising.'
In fact, our screens are unlikely to flood with the high-end imagery that Smeaton fears: Marie Stopes told the same Guardian reporter that although it would consider running TV ads,'it was 'unlikely to have the budget to buy airtime around peak time evening shows.' Abortion Rights' Ann Henderson told me that although AR backed the idea of advertising from commercial providers, its own emphasis remained on promoting the notion of free abortion through the NHS and other public providers.
BCAP expects to publish a final code in the autumn of this year.
