Abortion Opponents Could Be Jailed for 2 Years in France for Making a Website
In what some might consider to be a crackdown on free speech, lawmakers in France have passed a bill that would make operating certain pro-life abortion information websites punishable by up to two years in prison and $31,691 (€30,000) in fines.
On Wednesday, the French Senate approved legislation that would outlaw pro-life websites that persuade women not to get abortions. The passage comes after the French National Assembly approved the measure last week. But according to the Washington Free Beacon, the Senate approved an amendment that softens the ban to only punish websites that publish "misinformation."
Now that both houses have passed the legislation, members will confer to reconcile the assembly's original legislation with the senate's amended bill before passing it along to François Hollande to sign into law.
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Supporters say that the legislation would only punish websites that promote misleading information and claim to offer "neutral" hotlines that actually attempt to exert "psychological or moral pressure" on women looking to abort their unborn children, the Guardian reports.
However, critics are decrying the legislation as nothing more than an attempt to stifle freedom of expression.
According to CNS News, Gregor Puppinck, the director of the European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ), said that the language in the legislation would also make publishing factual information about abortion that helps the pro-life cause illegal.
He warned that posting things like statistics on the dangers of abortion, photos of fetal remains and even testimonies of women who have abortion regret or nightmare abortion experiences would also be illegal since they would technically exert pressure on women not to get an abortion.
Additionally, Puppinck asserted that publishing pro-life religious teachings, such as the teachings of the Catholic Church, would also be outlawed under the legislation.
"Publishing the Christian teaching that abortion is a crime could be seen as putting pressure on people," he said, according to the Washington Free Beacon. "The simple sharing of information that might upset moral conscience could be sufficient to constitute a crime."
Life News reports that Bruno Retailleau, the leader of the Republicans party in the Senate, said on a radio program that the legislation is "totally against freedom of expression."
He added that the legislation actually goes against the "spirit" of the country's 1975 law that legalized abortion. The law calls for women to be able to be informed of abortion alternatives.
Parliamentarian Maréchal-Le Pen also criticized the law. According to Breitbart, Pen warned in an op-ed that the country's pro-abortion government claims to have the ability to judge what is false information and true information, adding that an official government website tells readers that "there are no physical or psychological after-effects from abortion."
"In reality, the government seeks to kill any alternative to its official propaganda that aims at trivializing abortion," she wrote.
In a similar effort, last month the highest court in France banned an ad celebrating Down syndrome children because it might have made women who aborted Down syndrome children feel guilty.
Scores of women have spoken out about the physical and psychological problems they suffered after getting an abortion. Many first-hand testimonies have been catalogued by the pro-life initiative Silent No More.
"I remember IV's and extreme physical pain. I was drugged up and I couldn't walk to the car. It was days before I woke up," a woman named Mary Anne recounted at the 2016 March for Life in Washington D.C. "After the abortion, I suffered horrific periods of Pelvic Inflammatory Disease, Endometriosis, Ovarian Cyst and I also had a hysterectomy in 2010 to rule out ovarian cancer. I also had a double mastectomy. What I did not know was the physical, the psychological and the spiritual adverse reactions to what I did."
"I believed the big lie that I would be Ok," Mary Anne added.
Although the Left wants women to believe that there is no risk to their own life when getting an abortion, pro-life Ob-Gyn and instructor at the University of Mississippi Medical Center Freda Bush recounted during a panel discussion at Evangelicals for Life in January the story of a college student in Mississippi who died simply because her parents forced her to get an abortion procedure so she could finish her education.
"She became infected, ended up becoming septic, went to the ICU, had brain injury and she was discharged eventually to a nursing home," Bush explained. "That young lady died. It did not show up as an abortion death on the death certificate."
