France proposes ban on pro-life websites
The French government has revealed its plans to ban pro-life websites that provide biased information about abortion while appearing to be neutral.
The proposed ban, which was announced late September, would be under an amendment to the Equality and Citizenship Law. Offending website owners could face up to two years in prison and would be ordered to pay fines amounting to 30,000 euros (about $33,600).
"Being hostile to abortion is an opinion protected by the civil liberties in France," Laurence Rossignol, minister of families, children, and women's rights, told Rue89. "But creating websites that have all official appearances to actually give biased information designed to deter, guilt, traumatize is not acceptable," he added.
One of the targeted websites is ivg.net, which is among the top search results in Google competing with the government website, ivg.social-sante.gouv.fr. IVG stands for "l'interruption volontaire de grossesse" or "voluntary interruption of pregnancy."
Marie Philippe, a spokeswoman for ivg.net, said the website provides help for "women who suffer from an abortion who finally find a place here to express their pain, ideologically denied in our country."
Rossignol said that ivg.net and other similar sites are claiming to provide unbiased information but are mainly aimed at convincing women not to terminate their pregnancies.
"A woman facing an unwanted pregnancy is sometimes vulnerable," she said. "The sites we are talking about take advantage of the complexity of situations and emotions to get them to renounce abortion," Rossignol added.
According to World, ivg.net contains pages that list facts about the health risks of abortion and numerous testimonies from women who regretted going through the procedure.
In 1993, the French government created a law that prevents pro-life activists from using "moral and psychological maneuvers" to convince women not to go through an abortion.
In one case, an 84-year-old pro-life activist named Xavier Dor was fined 10,000 euros ($13,360) for attempting to counsel women at an abortion clinic. Dor reportedly showed knitted baby shoes to a woman. The 31st Criminal Chamber of the Paris Tribunal ruled that the act constituted "unheard of violence."
