An elected Texan wants to block information sites on voluntary termination of pregnancy. A bill that has little chance of passing.
After the prohibition of the voluntary interruption of pregnancy by Texas, last August, allowed by the revocation of the right to abortion by the very conservative Supreme Court, an elected Texan wishes to go further. Steve Toth has just proposed a bill that would force Internet service providers to block sites publishing all kinds of information on abortion.
>> REPORT: Texas and New Mexico, two neighboring states that are completely separated on the right to abortion
The objective is to prevent women who would like to terminate a pregnancy from seeking alternative solutions, such as going to the neighboring state where the right is maintained or ordering abortion pills on the Internet, for example. Then he would become, says the bill, “illegal to create, upload, publish, host a domain name for any website or platform that assists or facilitates a person’s efforts to obtain an abortion pill”.
Internet service providers are therefore asked to do everything in their technological power to block access to these sites inside Texas. The text explicitly names several of these sites. He even goes so far as to oppose the raising of funds on the Web which help women wishing to have an abortion to pay for their stay in a State where they could have an abortion. And the bill also invites citizens to sue all these sites on their own.
Steve Toth, one of Texas’ most conservative elected officials
Behind this law, there is a 62-year-old man: Steve Toth, an elected representative from Houston in the local Texas parliament. He made people talk about him ten years ago by proposing an extraordinarily permissive law on the carrying of weapons, in particular limiting the control of the federal state. He also worked on several other laws restricting abortion. He asked that the result of the presidential election be verified only in Democratic counties in the state.
Steve Toth is one of the most conservative elected officials in a state, which is not basically a reference in terms of liberal social policies. His bill on abortion and the Internet, dubbed “Women and Child Safety Act”, protection of women and children, would come into effect on September 1, if both houses of the Texan parliament vote in favor. It is an extreme bill with little chance of passing, but it shows the determination of certain elected officials and it can open doors to less extreme texts, which will nevertheless remain very strict.
The freedom of expression bill
A law like this would go against a federal law called “Section 230” which protects Internet platforms from prosecution for comments posted by their users. There is also the principle of net neutrality, which forces access providers to treat data flows in the same way, to prevent any favouritism, i.e. to prevent it being more easy to access a site more than another, simply because it generates more money for example.
But the Trump administration has questioned this principle of neutrality and Joe Biden has still not restored it. The bill poses a problem in terms of freedom of expression while at the same time, Texas also passed a law prohibiting social networks from sanctioning users who would have published on their platform “their point of view”, cis the term of the text of the law. In this case, Texas places freedom of expression above ideologies.