May God have mercy on their country and on ours.
Here’s the bit you left out
And so if every bit of information presented is factually correct, and yet “causes or is likely to cause the average pregnant woman to take a decision in relation to the termination of her pregnancy she would not have taken otherwise,” there should be no cause of action?
Would a pro-abortion office also have to advertise itself as biased? The people who want to talk a woman into aborting are billing their counsel as just helping the woman decide what’s best for her, while the ones who want to save the baby must declare themselves to have an agenda, as if it were wrong, even if they are the ones presenting the facts. If they simply tell the truth, they face jail time for failing to make their purpose clear, but someone with the opposite purpose who may distort the facts may actually be paid with tax money to do so and need never expalin his/her agenda. And which purpose does this set-up favor? Would it not make sense that the ones who wish to keep a baby alive would get the benefit of the doubt? Yet it is the other way around. That is what is wrong. The laws more and more reflect reversed morality.
I’m sure that’s all terribly interesting but it’s actually about whether advertising should mislead about the services provided or not.
What happened to “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor”
To be fair, the legislation is directed against “misleading” information. However, since it covers allegedly “misleading” information that is “factually correct,” one has to ask who is going to be making the call that the information is “misleading”? This is a very bad law indeed, and it’s further evidence of the incredibly patronizing and even tyrannical policies of the current Labour government. They really don’t trust people to think for themselves (apart from the prolife issue per se, this is part of a pattern on which many conservative British writers have commented).
The problem is that when you say “misleading” information can be “factually correct” you open up endless vistas of subjectivity. Suppose the prolife counselors cite studies showing that abortion is likely to result in medical and psychological problems for the mother, but the government board reviewing the case relies on other studies showing that this isn’t so? Suppose (as another poster has suggested) the government board labels philosophical and theological claims about the sanctity of life and the status of the unborn as “misleading”? Suppose any attempt to make the humanity of the fetus vivid to the mother (through ultrasounds, etc.) is labeled “misleading”? These things are all possible, even likely.
John Bercow, who tabled the amendment, is a Conservative.
So they now have a law on the books that says the deliberate deception of an individual for the purposes of talking a woman out of an abortion is grounds for a prosecution.
That’s awesome! Here’s why: