NETWORKS TO KEEP BAN ON CONTRACEPTIVE ADS

The three major television networks said Wednesday that they have no intention of altering their ban on commercials for contraceptives, despite an advertising campaign launched by Planned Parenthood to drum up support for a change.

“If we get 1,000 responses or 50,000 responses, the point is the same: We’re dealing with this issue already and we’ll continue dealing with it,” said George Schweitzer, CBS vice president for communications.

Schweitzer and Robert Mulholland, director of the industry-supported Television Information Office, said Planned Parenthood’s attacks on the networks in a newspaper ad this week constituted a publicity stunt that did nothing to address the national problem of teen-age pregnancy.

All three networks reiterated their longstanding ban on advertising for contraceptives, saying it was a controversial subject that touched on moral, religious and political sensitivities of a significant portion of the American public. Individual stations are free to accept such commercials, and some do, network spokesmen pointed out.

In a full-page ad that ran in The Times and five other newspapers, Planned Parenthood Federation of America accused ABC, CBS and NBC of “giving a dangerous double message to American teens”: promoting sexuality in their programs and commercials while banning mention of birth control in advertising and censoring information about it in programming.

Prepared by the Public Media Center in San Francisco, a nonprofit advertising agency, the ad bore the headline: “They did it 9,000 times on television last year. How come nobody got pregnant?” It contained letters to network executives that readers could clip out, sign and mail to show their support for a change in network policy.

It is part of a major national advertising campaign that Planned Parenthood unveiled at the organization’s annual convention last month to combat the epidemic of teen-age pregnancies--more than 1 million a year--by giving young people more access to sex education and contraceptives. Television has a critically important role to play in that regard, the organization believes.

However, TV industry officials contended that this week’s ads unfairly made the networks the heavies.

“Social problems in the United States have never been solved by television bashing,” Mulholland said in a letter to Planned Parenthood. A former president of NBC, he expressed disappointment that the organization had used “this tactic” and said that the ads “do a disservice to American broadcasting. They contain inaccurate statistics and unsubstantiated conclusions. Worse, they totally ignore the efforts of broadcasters to join with you in combatting the teen-age pregnancy crisis.”

CBS’ Schweitzer said that aside from the advertising issue, the networks have been taking a role in creating awareness of the teen-age pregnancy problem and ways to combat it, both in programming and public-service announcements. But they are trying to do so without specifically endorsing birth control as the answer, he stressed.

A sampling of reaction among network producers Wednesday found little support for the ad’s contention that the networks censored efforts to raise the subject of birth control in their programs.

Michael Zinberg, executive producer of ABC’s “Heart of the City,” which devoted an episode this season to a teen-age girl grappling with whether to get started on birth control pills, said, “I never had any problems with the network. . . . They didn’t want us to do a show where we advocated birth control, but they were eager to present a balanced point of view about it.”

While TV is guilty of using sexual suggestiveness to sell programs and products, Zinberg conceded, it is no worse in this regard than other media, and he argued that any fears about countering this attitude with information about preventing unwanted pregnancies emanate from the pocketbooks of advertisers and affiliated stations, not the networks.

Irma Kalish, executive producer of NBC’s “The Facts of Life,” and Gloria Monty, executive producer of ABC’s “General Hospital,” said the issue had not come up because they had never proposed stories that mentioned contraception.

But the ad won praise from Terry Wolverton, director of development for the Women’s Building, a Los Angeles feminist organization and social service organization.

“No longer are the networks able to portray things like drinking and drug abuse in a super-fantasized light,” she said. “The public knows that’s not right to do, and particularly for the impression it makes on young people. I think portraying sex without consequences is similar. That is a fantasy, a very harmful fantasy similar to the idea that if you use cocaine, you’re a glamorous person.”

Herb Gunther, executive director of the Public Media Center ad agency, said in defense of the ad that it did not hold television solely responsible for the teen-age pregnancy crisis, noting that parents and the schools also share blame.

“Television is the primary source of sexual information for teen-agers in America,” he said, and by not giving them the message that unwanted pregnancies may result from being sexually active, it “contributes to the problem.”

The use of clip-out letters in the ad that could be sent to the networks was a “standard tactic” that the agency uses to encourage citizens to communicate directly with decision makers, Gardner said.

Network officials said it was too early to gauge the ad’s response. But it has produced one result: A spokesman for Planned Parenthood’s national office in New York said Wednesday that the organization has scheduled a meeting Monday with Mulholland of the Television Information Office, who had ended his letter by saying, “Let’s attack teen-age pregnancy, not each other.”

Times staff writer Victor Valle and free-lance writer John Voland contributed to this article.