Carol Brown (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Pregnancy Counselling (Truth in Advertising) Bill 2006 seeks to promote transparency in the advice given by pregnancy counselling services. It seeks to achieve this by prohibiting pregnancy counselling services from producing or providing advertising material or advice that is misleading or deceptive. It is aimed squarely at making it easier for women to obtain truthful and unbiased advice when faced with the often-difficult situation of an unplanned pregnancy.

I am proud to co-sponsor this legislation with Senator Stott Despoja, Senator Judith Troeth and Senator Kerry Nettle. I wish to make it absolutely clear that this is a bill about promoting and ensuring truth in advertising. It is important that it is not misinterpreted as a bill that seeks to promote any one pregnancy option over another. It does not. It is simply aimed at protecting women from receiving advice that may be false, misleading or even deceiving. It is about promoting the fundamental right of Australian women everywhere to be aware of the nature of the pregnancy counselling advice they will receive.

In this sense, the bill is simply about promoting truth and not prescribing one pregnancy option over another. Anyone who thinks otherwise is incorrect. It does not matter what arguments are put forward by those who oppose the bill to try to fudge or muddy the debate. It does not matter that they deliberately declare that the bill is an attempt to do other than what I have just described and that they link it to moral arguments about the rights and wrongs of the choices women make when confronted with an unplanned pregnancy. Those arguments will inevitably be put forward today by those who oppose the bill. I wish to remind them that this bill is simply about ensuring that pregnancy counselling services disclose the truth.

It was correctly observed in the committee hearing that, up until now, in relation to the provision of pregnancy counselling services much of the focus has been on the rights of the service providers. Indeed, what this bill seeks to achieve is to shift that focus back onto the rights of the women accessing these services. This is where the focus should be.

This bill is necessary because services that provide counselling and advice free of charge—such as the majority of pregnancy counselling services in Australia—are exempt from operating within the confines of the Trade Practices Act—specifically, section 52, which dictates that ‘a corporation shall not engage in conduct that is misleading or deceptive, or likely to mislead or deceive’. As a result, pregnancy counselling services that provide advice free of charge are not governed by any legislative restriction that mandates that they not produce or provide advertising material or advice that is likely to be misleading or deceptive. A black hole exists, because currently there is no legislative guarantee that women accessing such services can be sure that the advice they are being given is accurate. Essentially, this bill makes pregnancy counselling services subject to the same laws as organisations which engage in trade or commerce. It basically provides the necessary legislative framework to ensure that advertising material and advice given by pregnancy counselling services cannot be misleading or deceptive.

As senators would be aware, this bill is an amended version of the Transparent Advertising and Notification of Pregnancy Counselling Services Bill 2005, introduced as a private member’s bill by Senator Stott Despoja. Senators will also be aware that Senator Stott Despoja’s private member’s bill was referred to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee for inquiry. The committee reported in August 2006. There was a minority report which received cross-party support. My colleagues Senators Stott Despoja, Moore, Nettle, Webber and Allison and I were the authors of that minority report, and I congratulate my fellow senators on their work for it. I welcome, too, the comments of Senator Judith Adams who, although she was not a signatory to the minority report, nevertheless supported the former bill.

That committee received a range of submissions and evidence, some of which supported the former bill, in its entirety or subject to amendments, and some of which opposed the bill. The committee report examined: the constitutionality of the bill; advertising a pregnancy counselling service; advertising in telephone directories; contentious terminology; whether the former bill was balanced; the options for dealing with an unplanned pregnancy; funding to pregnancy counselling services; qualifications and professional standards of counselling services and issues confronting women in rural, regional and remote communities.

Clearly, I cannot address today all the issues brought before the committee. However, I will address those issues that I believe are of great importance, not just to the committee members but to those who are most affected by the future of this bill—that is, the couples who need to access services and agencies and clinics, at a time in their lives when they are facing an unplanned pregnancy, and vulnerable women undergoing the sort of stress that only a woman who has experienced an unplanned pregnancy can truly appreciate.

The main issue raised before the committee, one that is very familiar to the sponsors of the current bill, is the fact that, under the law as it stands, there is no requirement for those persons who provide pregnancy counselling services to provide, in advance, a full and frank disclosure of any limitation on the nature of the advice or the referrals that they are willing to provide. The effect of this gap is that some women who, in response to the distress of an unplanned pregnancy, go to counsellors for advice or support find themselves unwilling recipients of advice that does not meet their needs and may even serve to increase their distress.

This bill is designed to prevent the situation in which a woman who wishes to consider all three options open to her—having and keeping the child, arranging an adoption, or terminating the pregnancy—instead finds herself the recipient of pregnancy counselling that is strongly directive in nature—that is, directed to the end of ensuring that, no matter what her wishes may be, her pregnancy will continue. Some providers are not only strongly directive; there are documented instances of counsellors having presented material that can only be called anti-abortion propaganda, because it has no basis in fact or is even contradicted by the findings of reputable research.

This raises a further inadequacy in the current legal framework for pregnancy and counselling services. It contains no proscription against the provision of misleading, inaccurate or untruthful information to a client and no requirement that counsellors or service providers apply professional standards in the advice that they provide and the techniques they employ, which should never be coercive.

During the committee hearings, proponents and opponents of the former bill traded accusations of bias. Such accusations may distract us from the most important consideration here. Where there is convincing evidence of the sort presented to the committee—evidence of the not infrequent provision of half-truths and scientifically inaccurate information and of a failure to provide advice on all available alternatives—the need to support this bill becomes clear. It must be passed to protect the very vulnerable women facing the distress of an unplanned pregnancy.

This bill does not seek to restrict the operation of services that provide only one type of pregnancy counselling service—namely, counselling to assist with the continuation of pregnancy. However, it does seek to ensure that such services are open about that fact. Some women will choose those services; some will not. The point is that potential service users should be able to make an informed choice on the basis of the advertising material made available by the service provider.

Some speakers in this place will have a view that this bill is not needed—that there is no need to require pregnancy counselling services to advertise what services they provide—and will ask, ‘Why would anyone provide misinformation or seek to deceive?’ Unfortunately, it does happen, and it appears to be happening more regularly.

Given the widespread interest and concern in this area, we now have a position whereby the yellow pages pregnancy counselling section offers advice to consumers in the form of an advertisement positioned prominently at the head of the section that reads:

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

Here we have an organisation that recognises the concerns and has attempted to act. And yet the federal parliament is yet to act by simply putting in legislation that requires that pregnancy counselling services advertise their services—no more, no less.

Frankly, I can hardly conceive of how there could be any objection to the provision of openness, honesty and transparency on a matter of such importance. Yet, clearly, there are some people who disagree with the principles promoted by this bill. Do they really believe that it is justifiable to conceal the true nature and philosophy of a service that will only offer assistance and advice on pregnancy continuation because the end, of dissuading a woman from deciding to terminate a pregnancy, justifies the means—the use of a veil of deceit?

During the Senate committee hearings, the Bessie Smyth Foundation described how many women feel angry that anti-abortion agencies masquerading as impartial counselling services try and tell them what they should do and refuse to provide referral information for termination of pregnancy. This same group explained the state of mind of young women who had been to some service providers. They said that many women have been made to feel petrified about having a termination ‘because of the misinformation’ they were given.

I feel deeply for any young woman or any couple who have been misled or placed in a position where they find themselves unable to gain the information they need at what is a major turning point in their lives. This bill aims to ensure that those who need pregnancy counselling services will be able to choose those services most appropriate to their needs and values, and that they will be able to obtain the best quality information concerning all of the available options that they might wish to consider.

There are no simple answers or one-size-fits-all answers to the complex questions raised by an unplanned pregnancy. Openness, honesty and absolute professionalism should govern those who offer advice and assistance through pregnancy counselling services. Decisions made without full access to the facts and without considering all the choices available could be wrong and a person may regret it for the rest of their life. Such decisions cannot be revisited in the weeks, months or years to come. A decision to terminate a pregnancy, to see a pregnancy to term or to give a baby up for adoption is not one that should be made lightly or in haste; it is a decision that the person making it has to live with for the rest of their life. Australians must have access to open, honest information about the available pregnancy counselling services. Anything else is clearly unacceptable. They deserve nothing less than the truth. They also deserve access to transparent information about the nature of the services funded by the government. Specifically, this bill proposes that the pregnancy counselling service—whether provided in person or over the phone—be prohibited from publishing, distributing, displaying or broadcasting any material that is either misleading or deceptive or is likely to mislead or deceive. This measure will ensure that such services are subject to the same standards that apply to all other services that fall under the Trade Practices Act.

The application of such a standard to pregnancy counselling services is necessary to ensure that women accessing such services are not provided with information that is skewed or distorted in any way. It is important to note that the bill also provides that it is a defence to the abovementioned prohibition if it can be proved that the people involved in providing the relevant information took no part in determining its content and could not reasonably be expected to have known that the material was in fact inaccurate or misleading. This bill provides that all pregnancy counselling services which do not provide referrals for terminations must include in any advertising or material a statement that indicates that it does not provide referrals for such services. Likewise, the bill also requires that counselling services which provide referrals for terminations must include in any advertising or material a statement indicating that the service provides referrals for all pregnancy options. These requirements are aimed at ensuring that women accessing such services are aware of the nature of the information provided by the service they are planning to access.

I realise that it is unlikely that this debate will result in a decision being made today on this bill. It is my hope that this bill will be taken up by government and afforded the same legislative time that government gave to the stem cell legislation and to the Therapeutic Goods Amendment (Repeal of Ministerial responsibility for approval of RU486) Bill, now known commonly as the RU486 bill, which was again introduced by cross-party senators Moore, Nash, Troeth and Allison. This amended the Therapeutic Goods Act 1989 to transfer the responsibility for regulatory approval of RU486 from the Minister for Health and Ageing to the Therapeutic Goods Administration. Both these bills were the subject of heated debate within the parliament and in the wider community. Both pieces of legislation were the start of a historic cooperative approach by women senators across parties, who joined together to start and push debate where there appears to be no party willing to do so.

It is important that transparency in this area is achieved to ensure women are able to make informed choices about who they can contact for information when deciding if they can continue with a pregnancy, when seeking support in continuing the pregnancy or when they have decided to terminate the pregnancy. This is an important issue. Women have the right to know what type of service they are going to. A pregnant woman wanting advice should be able to know whether she is ringing a counselling service that advises her on all options related to her pregnancy or only some of them, and, if she has made a decision and is seeking specific support or referral, she should be able to easily find and access appropriate services for her needs. Without clarity and truth in advertising, this seemingly simple request cannot be fulfilled.