Every state in the United States has a law on the books against deceptive advertising, and pregnancy help centers operate in every state in the U.S., with at least one in 51 percent of all the counties in the nation.
Yet elected officials are proclaiming louder than ever how pregnancy centers use “deceptive advertising practices” to “lure” women into life-saving services. As Roe was being overturned last June, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., introduced a federal bill called the Stop Anti-Abortion Disinformation Act, or the SAD Act, aimed squarely at pregnancy centers’ advertising practices.
With the sea change at the Supreme Court regarding Roe, such a bill is suddenly extremely important, right?
Wrong. Maloney has proposed essentially the same bill every year for the last 20 years. Twenty years of introducing an order, of sorts, intended to stop so-called “deceptive advertising.”
According to Law Insider, “Deceptive advertising means creating, using, or promoting the use of any advertising material, promotional literature, testimonial, guarantee, warranty, label, brand, insignia, or other representation, however disseminated or published, which is misleading, false, or untruthful.”
If every state already has laws against deceptive advertising and if pregnancy centers are, in their opponents’ words, advertising deceptively, why is another law required? You’d think with 2,800-plus pregnancy centers in America, the current laws would have been easy to use to stop the “deceptive advertising” practices the abortion proponents rail against. But that’s not happened.
And now there are new laws being passed or sought in various pro-abortion
