Germany Ends Ban on Abortion Advertisement
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I.e. this is less about "ad" advertisements but more about e.g. doctors having flyers better informing about what is possible/legal in the waiting room and similar.
Like before you basically had to "somehow magically know" who could do an abortion as even mentioning it on the doctors (hospitals) website might be counted as advertisement.
Actually… next time you’re close to sleeping with someone, say “hey, you can just get an abortion, we don’t need to use a condom”. Tell me what she says.
The whole idea is not about making a conscious, calculated choice. It's about how comfortable you become with certain risk. It's on the same level as: if we start advertising how safe airbags are, would we see the average speed get a tiny increase nationally.
I would like to know where this belief comes from. Discussing this change of law like this, with vague anecdotes and fears, is outright dangerous, since the argument is essentially against giving people appropriate medical information.
In this case, from personally having conversations with two women who essentially said "I forgot the pill that day, but had sex anyway and got plan B in the morning".
Also the context in this subthread is about commercial advertising and the impression of "cool", not about medical information. Completely separate ideas.
People have always forgotten to take any pill they have to take regularly. Plan B gives people an option they didn’t have before when that happens. There’s no evidence there that Plan B causes people to take the pill less regularly.
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/contraception/miss-combined-pi... - “ If you have missed 1 pill anywhere in the pack or started a new pack 1 day late, you're still protected against pregnancy.”
This is literally the context of the speculation in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31883497
I'm done with this thread. Too many people jump to conclusions and don't understand threads of conversation.
Plan B, in this case the morning after pill, is a different beast from what we usually discuss when talking about abortion. There are no real negative consequences when taking it (even more so when compared with contraception pills) so I am not sure why you are so afraid.
IUDs are much better than pills anyway, and you can forget about them without issue. They also don’t cause hormone-related problems. If you are serious about your argument, you should advocate for this sort of device (and also abortion, because even if they are generally reliable, 0% risk does not exist).
> Also the context in this subthread is about commercial advertising and the impression of "cool", not about medical information.
That is a misunderstanding of the law in question, for which “advertising” means “making people aware of it”, and does include things like what is put on a doctor’s website and any document they distribute.
Well, it might be a different cast for you, today. But the people writing laws in conservative states don't see it that way. Many of them are looking to ban anything that stop pregnancy after sex, specifically including plan B pills. A few extremists are even talking about going after contraception too. It isn't about scientific definitions. It is about increasing the risk of pregnancy in order to dissuade young people from having sex.
Abortion is _never_ easy.
Even if it is easy accessible.
It's such a typical "I have no idea about the topic but insist on pretending I do argument".
Also we did advertise how safe airbacks are in the past, it didn't make people drive more reckless as people generally do not balance risks and gains when they decide to drive fast.
It's bs like saying because there is a hospital close by you are less care full with taking you heart medicine.
The question of when human lives begins can be a religious argument but it may as well be not. In the same vein the valuation of human life to be precious is either religious or ideological as well.
Are contraceptives unjust towards the potential person too?
>The question of when human lives begins can be a religious argument but it may as well be not.
Sure - and in this case the court silently assumed the Catholic ideology.
No, the line is drawn after that. It isn't my line either, just how the law sees it. You could argue this to be bad or not, some women complain that the bureaucracy around it made them feel like criminals but others argue that this is normal for German bureaucracy.
> Sure - and in this case the court silently assumed the Catholic ideology.
And probably protestant and orthodox Christians too. As well as Jews, Buddhists, Hindu and some others. While religion is a good predictor, the reasoning not necessarily is and there are also secular people against abortion as well. I think the court reasoned with a technicality of the law, but I am no expert.
>And probably protestant and orthodox Christians too. As well as Jews, Buddhists, Hindu and some others.
To many protestants, Jews, Buddhists and Hindu the idea of "life from conception" is no different from what the idea of sacred cows is to Christians.
>there are also secular people against abortion as well.
There are also secular people against vaccines. There are no valid, non-religious arguments for "life from conception", it's just a superstition invented by a certain religion.
PS: also some diverse, trans, queer, gay, lesbians, cis, … are idiots. I don’t want to leave out anyone excluded. We are all humans, after all.
(which is one of the weaknesses of the law as the state could cause an situation where getting the consulting is practically unlikely by withholding accreditation, but this is currently not the case at all as far as I know. Through this is if I remember correctly why pro-choice advocates had been against such approaches as at least some republican states can be expected to do exactly that, as it has shown in some other contexts)
Anyway this is NOT a reason to massively constraint the freedom and choice about their own body of a woman. Especially if it might threaten their live. And yes some republican states abortion laws (which are now in effect again I think) do in-practice even prevent abortions all the time which are necessary for the health of the mother, even in cases where there is no or hardly any choice for a child to be born alive even when the mother spends most here time in intensive care of doctors (which most people can't afford anyway)).
And if anything is clear then that a lot of republicans (of which have influence) want to make abortion impossible, partially by law and partially by making it practically impossible in 9 out of 10 cases where it is allowed by law (and wanted).
Lastly you could do the same argument for:
- driving cars, idiots driving car kill a _lot_ of people, including children every year (well more like week)
- having anything weaponizeable from large knives to guns, the amount of children dying because of idiots mishandling guns isn't that small either
- etc. etc.
- also for the ridiculousness: Idiots rising children kill them all the time, too. So surely you should take children away from any adult which isn't socially well established.y
EDIT: Oh forgot the most important part, just because someone is a idiot they shouldn't have less rights.
I was just referring to the parent comment that "women are not idiots" which is false. All people can be idiots, regardless of gender. My comment that you replied to was also idiotic, since I clearly didn't express myself clear enough.
But as an alternative to contraception for birth control? Certainly. E. G., https://www.guttmacher.org/article/2018/01/reported-contrace...
Which is as far as I know generally know by woman. (EDIT: At lest in Germany)
So no, this will not reduce the amount of contraceptives people use.
There is nothing magical about this. There are lists for this, from official sites, from NGOs, from health centers. The major difference this law made, was that you were only allowed to passively inform about this stuff. Now it will be allowed to be more actively.
When traveling to the US, it always strikes me how different public ads are. The US has more public ads and also much more aggressive ads. An ad for an injury lawyer would be unthinkable in Europa.
In fact, they make up a significant percentage of adverts!
In any case it's hardly an issue for them as most doctors are fully booked for months, so they rarely need to advertise their services. Companies like Doctolib therefore aim more at optimizing the booking process to e.g. ensure that canceled bookings get backfilled automatically to increase the overall booking rate, though even that is usually not a problem and most doctors overbook their appointments to make sure they stay busy during the day (that's why you often have to wait 30-60 minutes here even if you have an appointment scheduled).
Not true anymore, in the last years, mostly on private TV channels & internet ads, people are and were being blasted with ads for gambling sites :D
Ads for tobacco seems to be fine though, and ads for vape pens (that actually taunt you into using them) are everywhere
When did this happen? When I was in Munich a few years back there were poster ads for cigarettes everywhere. I remember them being not very subtle about their “smoking is cool” message.
Btw manufacturers (not the merchants though) are still allowed to hand out free cigarettes.
But there are ads for military weapons, like https://youtu.be/fTBA5tQsDbE.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_control_in_Germany
Owning a gun for self-defence is only allowed in rare cases like security personnel and politicians whose lives are threatened. The normal allowed categories are hunting, sports, and collectors, but even then you need a licence (with a few minor exceptions like flint-lock rifles and flare guns).
I'm not sure about a ban (I guess there is, though) but since gun ownership is restricted the market is quite small. Outside of narrow targeted ads (say in gun owner magazines) it'd be a waste of money.
https://www.oscepa.org/en/news-a-media/op-eds/the-danish-way...
https://slks.dk/fileadmin/user_upload/dokumenter/medier/rekl...
"Law against unfair competition"
Gesetz gegen den unlauteren Wettbewerb (UWG)
This is directly refuted by the section of legal code that you linked. The phrasing in there (translated in German) is along the lines of "Mentioning a competitor's product is unfair advertising if [specific catalog of unfair situations]". The list includes things like "comparing products intended for different purposes and functions" or "comparing products by qualities that are not objectively measurable".
I'm not saying that you will not be walking on thin ice if you engage in comparative advertising. In fact, if you target a particularly litigous competitor, you may have a bad time even if you're within your rights, but to say that comparative advertising is flat out illegal is not backed up by the phrasing of the law as presented in your source.
Disclaimer: IANAL. This is not legal advice.
Not anymore, since 1987.
It's not about "advertising" for abortions but about _providing information_ on abortions as a doctor.
In the past it wasn't even allowed to advertise on your website that you do abortions, or have more information on it in your waiting room, so patients had to actively ask if you offer it.
There was a case where a doctor listed abortions as one of their offerings on their website, and that was seen as an advertisement. [Citation needed, my memory might fail me here]
So "no advertisement" pretty much means "don't tell anyone anywhere beforehand".
And that was seen as non-helpful, especially as abortions are legal in Germany.
Nope, the criminal code forbids abortion, but doesn't punish it in some circumstance (within some months of pregnancy, after a counselling session and some time for thinking it over etc.)
There are huge debates to make it more legal by turning this around or clearer restricting in criminal code.
§218a lists that it is not a crime under certain circumstances ("Tatbestand des § 218 ist nicht verwirklicht, wenn"), but the heading of that one is "Straflosigkeit", so "no punishment".
IANAL but this reads like it is not a crime under the listed conditions. Which is different from no punishment.
Ending the "advertising" ban is a great step forward in letting people actually access doctors' services. Legalization seems unlikely, unfortunately, though the news around Dobbs has at least opened up the discussion again.
Most notable: "The pregnant woman does not incur the penalty specified in section 218 if the termination was performed by a physician after counselling (section 219) and no more than 22 weeks have elapsed since conception"
You seem to have made a quite unlucky typo there. It's 12 weeks since conception, not 22. We are not that progressive.
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__218a.html https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fristenregelung
It's COVERED in public health insurance. Get the letter (from public health insurance), get the family counseling (which is provided by the senate, and unlike what people think, is informative and gives surgical and grief counseling with info sheets), let it sink in for 3 days, then go through it with a gynecologist. It should be completed before 12 weeks.
These are services offered, paid and staffed by the government (even the public health insurers).
To compare it to private "smart shops" in Netherlands is stupid.
Happy to see the country I live in overturning that Nazi law that aimed to produce more Aryan babies in favor of acknowledging that women are rational beings. The counseling restriction is still infantilizing, but at least you have a lot of discretion in which organization you get it from - ProFamilia allows that you have better knowledge of your life than they do and have made your own decision, and will just help you implement it.
I am angry and hurt by the place I'm from and still have most of my family, because a situation that was handled rationally and kindly in Germany (an ectopic pregnancy - no “counseling session” aside from a doctor at the hospital factually advising me of my medical options) would make me hesitant to even go to the emergency room in Texas. No one really knows that they have an ectopic pregnancy until an actual doctor examines them, and the only treatment option is which manner of termination you and the doctor choose. Otherwise, it’s probably a normal miscarriage, which is treated with painkillers and encouragement to try again in a few months in reasonable places, but looks to be a legal risk in Texas.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/11/11/exhaust-alternative...
Or talking in circles to find the perfect solution, and it taking very long to realize that no perfect solution exists.
A healthy dose of pragmatism would make this lovely country... "perfect" :)
Ah well, I think there are quite some other traits missing and there is too much stiffness. I am curious if the upcoming legalisation of weed will help, or not.
Regards being a Nazi law: not all Nazi laws are evil or outdated. They were the administration of a big country in overall very innovative times.
Yes, but this law comes from the "ideal" of having many children (who then become soldiers) not some unidological administrative process.