Free speech for me but not for thee. ACLU busted!

So common sense, Walter, tells me that pregnancies are also of great interest to men, at least the but also the men have a legal right to have some say in the matter. Along with responsibilities should come some rights as well.

I gave an example earlier in which a woman would probably have a civil action against such an organization. If the latter falsely tells the woman it will help her get an abortion, but instead delays her to the extent that she cannot get legally get one, she would have a valid action against the organization.

In my example, the organization defrauded the woman by leading her to believe that it would get her an abortion. That would be an actionable tort.

Saying that a practice is presently legal is NOT a logical answer to the question of whether a deceptive practice should be made illegal.

Fraud is fraud. It has always been fraud. Deceptive advertising is deceptive advertising, whether its cars or abortion. Stealing was stealing 200 years ago. It still is.

Keltic, you simply want to make more punitive laws to target anti-abortion centers and stifle them.

The organization is not billing a service that 'helps her get an abortion'. It is billing itself as a an 'abortion counseling service'. Looking at it one way, that's a far sight more honest than a 'pro abortion' clinic billing itself as "Planned Parenthood".

I want to prevent them from falsely advertising that they provide Abortion Services when they do not. When the legislatures passed the truth-in-lending laws, were they trying to get rid of banks? No. They just wanted the prospective borrower to know what they were getting into before they signed for the loan. Same principle here. These anti-choice centers should be barred from advertising under Abortion Services when they provide no such abortion services at all.

I'm not talking about signing a loan, or signing anything. All we are talking about is free counseling services.

keltic, I get numerous calls by salesmen, and many will say right off, "I am not selling anything." At that point, I call them on that statement. Technically, they may not be selling anything right at that moment, but soon they intend to sell you something. Under your reasoning, should we throw those guys in jail for saying that? Should a law be enacted to cut out this misleading come-on?

By the way the top three services listed for Planned Parenthood have nothing to do with bringing a woman to parenthood, they are birth control, emergency contraception, and abortion.

What they do inside the organization is one thing. The discussion, however, was on false advertising.

But offering 'abortion counseling' that is anti-abortion is not illegal.

Foxfyre wrote:

What they do inside the organization is one thing. The discussion, however, was on false advertising.

This makes little sense. What happens once you enter the organization has everything to do with whether their advertising is false. If the advertising is constructed to give a false impression of what they do, it is false advertising.

Foxfyre wrote:

But offering 'abortion counseling' that is anti-abortion is not illegal.

It should be, since it implies they are counseling a woman on how to get an abortion, or perhaps how to deal with her emotions during the period she gets one. An organization that counsels women to NOT to get an abortion 100% of the time has no business advertising itself as an "abortion counseling" service. Their advertising is in complete contradiction to what they actually do.

Incidentally, it would not surprise me if there were not some state or local laws against this form of false advertising already on the books. This is a fairly new scam, and sometimes it takes state and local authorities time to figure out how to prosecute something new.

That is why I favor the bill presently before Congress which makes it a crime for an anti-choice center to advertise under headings which say "Abortion" or "Clinic", since they are not a clinic and they don't facilitate abortions in any way.

The anti-choice centers can still be open, they can still counsel women not to get abortions all they want to. They will just not be allowed to give the false impression that they are part of the abortion process in some way, when their only goal is to prevent the woman from getting an abortion.

Offering counseling to a woman as to how an abortion may affect her is indeed abortion counseling. This is apparently the bottom line of this argument now. I say it is abortion counseling. Some counseling concerning abortion should provide the positives and negatives concerning whether to get an abortion or not.

Are you suggesting that Planned Parenthood actually puts in its promotional materials that its primary emphasis is in helping women get abortions and that Planned Parenthood derives the bulk of their funding because that is their emphasis? Do they put in their promotional material that they don't make it their policy to give equal time (or any time) to explaining the downside of abortion or explain the alternatives to it and resources that help women choose the alternatives?

Advocate:

Thanks for the support. But I'm finding it very interesting watching the righties squirm around trying to justify an obvious deception. About how, with a straight face, try to maintain that it is deceptive for an organization which does it's best to prevent unplanned parenthood to call itself Planned Parenthood. About how they rail against moral relativism in other threads, but when it comes to these anti-choice centers' deceptions, they sound like Sgt. Bilko saying, "Okay, so it's deceptive. But hey, who's really totally honest out there anyway? What's the big fat deal about a little deception in the advertising?"

Of all people wishing to mention moral relativism, you pro-abortion people should at least recognize you have no ground to stand on. Killing the unborn is hardly a very sound place to make your stand against misleading advertising, of all things.

I am simply pointing out that what is good for the goose ought to be good for the gander.....but someone that might tell a woman the downside of having an abortion really, really bothers you. You are hopeless.