In 1995 ALDU heard from the ASA about an anonymous complaint concerning an ALDU advewrtisement in the Law Society's Gazette. In this case the ASA had already, before writing to ALDU, determined that the complaint was invalid.
ALDU treated the ASA with more respect than Cranmer showed, although well aware of the fact that the ASA has no authority or right, other than a self created right, to make any judgement. The fact remains, however, that had the ASA decided that the advertisement did in some way contravene its own code, the Law Society's Gazette and other periodicals might well have refused to take ALDU's advertisement in the future.
ALDU was not required to respond but decided to do so, if only to show that they stood entirely by the words of its advertisement. An extract from Newsletter 66 of Summer 1995 is below containing the response sent to the ASA. Much more could have been said on each of the three points of the 'complaint', but life's just too short...
Responses to complaints
At the end of April 1995 we received a letter from the Advertising Standards Authority Ltd., (ASA), telling us that they had received a complaint about the text of the advertisement which we place in various legal journals. Although most if not all of our members will have seen our advertisements at some time or other, we change the text of what we say from time to time, and so we set out here the current wording about which the complaint had been made to the ASA.
"170,633
This was the number of children who, at some time between their conception and birth, were deliberately killed in England and Wales in 1992 - supposedly under the umbrella of the Abortion Act 1967. All these children were living human beings. Because of a failure or unwillingness to care for them it was decided to kill them."
The complainant, whose identity was not revealed to us by the ASA, had apparently objected that our advertisement was "offensive and misleading" on the following grounds :
1. the reference to "children" is misleading as the majority of abortions will have taken place at less than 13 weeks gestation ;
2. the use of the word "supposedly" suggests some kind of fraud; and
3. the option of an abortion is taken for a number of reasons, including the health of the mother, not because of a "failure or unwillingness to care".
The ASA told us that they had advised the complainant that they would not be pursuing the complaint on this occasion because, in their view and on the facts available to them, there did not seem to be a case to investigate under the British Codes of Advertising and Sales Promotion, and they concluded their letter to us with the comment that the advertisement clearly expresses the advertiser's view, and that it was therefore unlikely to mislead or offend readers of The Law Society's Gazette.
We naturally thanked the ASA for their courtesy in advising us that a complaint had been made to them about our advertisement and for their kindness in letting us know what the complainant's objections were and what the ASA's response had been to those objections. We considered, however, that it would be helpful and worthwhile if we were to give the ASA our own reasoned response to the complaints made, and so, following the above numbered paragraphs, we pointed out that :-
1. the words "child" and "children" are not limited in use to the age of the person concerned, but are used commonly and quite normally to mean the offspring of human parents of any age, and that, in the specific context of abortion, the word "child" is used in the Abortion Act itself (at section l(l)(d) of the Act as amended in 1990), and that while it was true that some of the amendments to the Abortion Act which had been introduced by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990 used the word "foetus" instead of the word "child", nevertheless the word "foetus" denotes a specific age, (i.e., from the end of the embryonic stage of development until birth, when the child is fully developed but still in his or her mother's womb), and many abortions are carried out upon children who have not yet reached the foetal stage and who therefore should not be described as "foetuses", and that, consequently, "child" or "children" were the only words which correctly denote all those who are killed in abortion operations ;
2. our Association had little doubt that crime, and maybe even fraud, was indeed being perpetrated in the matter of abortion on a massive scale, with pregnant mothers, as always, among the victims, - and here we enclosed a copy of our Spring 1992 Newsletter, Number 53, in which we drew attention to the scandalous lack of investigation into the actual facts concealed behind the abortion notification forms which abortionists are required to complete and send to the Department of Health, and we pointed out that over 90% of all notified abortions are carried out on the ground that the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk to the mental health of the mother greater than if the pregnancy were terminated but with few if any of the certifying doctors being psychiatrists or psychologists or having any formal qualifications in matters of mental health; we also quoted the June 1994 Report by the Commission of Inquiry into the Operation and Consequences of the Abortion Act (see our Autumn 1994 Newsletter) and the reported statement of the representatives of the Royal College of Psychiatrists to the effect that, in their expert opinion, there was in fact no psychiatric justification for abortion, and how, in cases of abortion performed on the ground of greater risk to the mother's mental health, it was difficult to see how the doctors' opinions could, in the circumstances, have been formed in good faith as is required by the Abortion Act if the subsequent abortion is to avoid being criminal ;
3. although the complainant had stated that the option of abortion was taken for "a number of reasons", it was perhaps significant that only one (viz., the "health of the mother") had been given by the complainant, and that in 1992 (when over 170,000 notified abortions had been carried out in England and Wales) in only two instances had an abortion been performed to save the mother's life or to prevent grave permanent injury to her, and that in such rare cases, (so rare as to be statistically non-existent), if the mother dies the child will necessarily die too; furthermore, in other cases where an abortion has been performed allegedly to prevent injury to the mother's health, then our Association does indeed believe that this represents a failure on the part of those most closely involved to provide the proper care that such mothers so obviously need, and that it was a medically-unjustifiable notion to suggest that, in order to safeguard a mother's health, her child should be killed, for such an idea would not be accepted in relation to a born child and there was no reason why it should be accepted just because the child was unborn.
