France Takes Steps to Criminalize Pro-Life Advocacy
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Pro-life Americans can still celebrate living in a country where their right to free speech is protected under the First Amendment. Sadly, France does seem to want to offer the same protection to its citizens, especially those who involved with pro-life advocacy.
In fact, France has recently adopted two measures to try to stop people from telling the truth about abortion. The first measure was implemented last month when a French court upheld a ban on a video that advocated on behalf of children with Down syndrome. The court declared that the work might “disturb the conscience of women who had lawfully made different personal life choices.”
In France, in other words, it is illegal to promote a video for disabled children because it might offend some women who killed their disabled children in utero.
The second measured happened last week when the lower house of the French parliament passed a bill that criminalizes websites that might dissuade women from abortion.
The bill now goes to the senate. The evident purpose of the proposed law is to ban most French pro-life advocacy from the Internet. In the eyes of the French government, any effective pro-life message delivered over the Internet is now a criminal act.
It is expected that the final reading of the bill will come at the end of February, just before the end of the current legislature.
As National Review notes:
“The French government had already taken pains to ensure that pro-life activism was tightly controlled. It was already illegal for activists to “obstruct” the operation of an abortion clinic by exerting “moral and psychological pressures” on women who might be considering an abortion. Apparently that was not enough. The proscription has now been expanded to outlaw “digital interference.”
On the one hand, this is astonishing. A country in Western Europe is openly criminalizing political activism and engagement. But that it is happening makes sense when you consider both the reality of abortion and the politics surrounding it.
After all, what does abortion do? It kills — specifically, human beings, with premeditation. There is no debating this, certainly not in the context of biological fact. The unborn are human beings, no matter what the crackpot pseudo-science of the pro-choice movement might say.
If you’re in favor of abortion rights, then, you may feel the need to cover up that unpleasant and ultimately horrifying reality. Civilized people do not, as a rule, advocate the killing of innocent human beings. And so we have the curious euphemisms of the pro-choice movement, which function much as perfume did in 18th-century France, by covering up the stink. Thus the label “pro-choice,” the slogan “a woman’s right to choose,” the expression “terminate a pregnancy,” the viciously ignorant and deceptive term “clump of cells”— all of these locutions are meant to conceal what abortion is.”
Here is a video by Students for Life of America discussing the criminalization of pro-life advocacy:
Telling the truth about abortion can be unpopular and even risky. But, it is absolutely necessary.
