April 25th, 2008 • Contributed by Dino Corvino
Posted in: Action
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This article appeared in The City Pages in Wausau, WI. It was written by Pat Peckham, and ties in to our podcast regarding Phyllis and the Hope Pregnancy Center.
Family Planning Web Ruse
Hope Pregnancy drops its internet site designed to intercept unwary Family Planning clients.
Up until this past week, women trying to get information online about Family Planning Health Services may have been unknowingly diverted to Hope Pregnancy Resource Center in Wausau.
Family Planning’s web address is fphs.org, but anyone who mistakenly typed in fphs.com instead – a common error, as must people know – would find themselves on a special page set up by Hope, which opposes much of FPHS does at its seven north-central Wisconsin offices between Antigo and Mauston.
The agencies are less than two miles apart in Wausau, but could hardly be more different. FPHS is about low-cost contraception, reproductive health and nutrition for pregnant women and their young children; it does not provide abortions. Hope is a pro-life organization and visitors to the Hope web site won’t find the word “contraceptive” anywhere.
By purchasing the fphs.com domain name, Hope was using a ruse known as cyber-squatting. Practitioners lock up an internet address to gain a competitive advantage or to sell the address.
But after fielding inquiries about the diversion site from City Pages for a story, the site was shut down over the weekend, says Janna Janke, director of Hope’s office in Wausau. Hope’s board of directors decided at a special meeting to stop the practice rather than continue to do anything that others might see as “untoward”.
FPHS set up its web site in 2001 and Director Lon Newman received advice that’s still standard: Don’t just tie up the “.org” domain name, but also register for “.com”, “.net” and any other variant. Newman says he was told this could cost thousands of dollars. As it turned out, Hope is paying only $9.95 a year for the domain name www.fphs.com.
Janke says the idea came from the person who helps the agency with its marketing. When the FPHS-intentioned internet user landed at the Hope site, the voice of an actress automatically began: “Hey, wait. Don’t leave. I was going to go there, too, but then I found this place called Hope. I didn’t realize it, but it was exactly what I needed.” As a slide show rolled, the actress continued with message such as, “She didn’t judge me….” No link to the actual FPHS site was provided.
Janke says she didn’t see the internet diversions as deceitful. “We are hoping they (those diverted to the Hope site) would stop and realize they have more than one option.”
Newman calls it “deliberate deception. It appears that the whole program is based on misrepresentation.”
There was more at stake than theoretical fairness or ethics. Newman argues, especially when it comes to women seeking out FPHS for emergency contraception, also known as Plan B. After a woman has unprotected sex, she only as a few days before the pill becomes ineffective in preventing a possible pregnancy. “The life-altering potential of an unwanted pregnancy can be enormous,” Newman says.
Janke says Hope is set up to help women with pregnancy, not to provide contraceptives. She says she and her staff would not refer any client to FPHS, but if a woman asks about contraception, they would tell her to ask her doctor about that.
FPHS’s clients largely are low-income women, either uninsured or underinsured, who would find contraceptives unaffordable through a family physician. CP
