Texas Bill Takes Aim at Online Speech About Abortion Pills
A bonkers new Texas bill would ban a bunch of activities related to abortion, including taking abortion pills in other states and facilitating or hosting online speech about procuring abortions. It would also hold all abortion pill manufacturers liable for violations when a specific manufacturer could not be ascertained.
“Wait—that’s all constitutional?” you might be wondering. To which I say: Ha! This is clearly a bill unburdened by thoughts of constitutionality.
Texas Rep. Steve Toth (R–The Woodlands) introduced the legislation, which is called the Women and Child Safety Act. “If passed, the law would allow citizens to bring civil suits against internet service providers that don’t block [certain] websites,” writes the feminist pundit Jessica Valenti on Substack.
The Women and Child Safety Act lists six specific websites that must be blocked, but its intended reach is much, much broader. If it were to become law, it would give all sorts of internet service providers a strong incentive to block all sorts of speech related to abortion—a huge chilling effect on legal expression.
Multi-Faceted Madness
The Women and Child Safety Act is a broad bill with both criminal and civil provisions.
On the criminal side, it would create new offenses of “paying for or reimbursing abortion costs” and “destroying evidence of an abortion,” both felonies.
The part about paying clearly targets abortion funds—nonprofit groups that help women cover the costs of abortions, including travel out of state in places where abortion is banned. “The legislation prompts the state Attorney General to investigate and charge abortion funds using the RICO Act, which is meant to go after organized crime,” Valenti points out.
Other parts of the bill would be enforced by private civil actions.
This includes a prohibition on manufacturing, distributing, mailing, transporting, delivering, or providing an abortion-inducing drug. Doing so could leave one liable for wrongful death or personal injury claims.
The bill would also make the mere possession of abortion-inducing drugs forbidden—though it excludes any “conduct engaged in by a pregnant woman who aborts or attempts to abortion the woman’s unborn child.” So possession of abortion pills is OK if you’re planning to take them yourself. The paternalistic premise here is that women who have abortion are victims, and thus not liable for their actions (very similar to the way some people think paying for sex should be a crime but selling it should not, since sex workers are considered legally unable to consent).
The bill also says it’s fine to have the drugs “for purposes of entrapping a person” who violates the law. This is odd, considering that neither the state nor government employees may enforce the law, nor can they team up with private citizens to encourage lawsuits. This seems to indicate that private citizens will be able to conduct abortion-pill entrapment schemes.
Lastly, the bill would ban “provid[ing] information on how to obtain an abortion-inducing drug”;”creat[ing], edit[ing], upload[ing], host[ing], maintain[ing], or register[ing] a domain name for an Internet website, platform, or other interactive computer service that assists or facilitates a person’s effort in obtaining an abortion-inducting drug”; and “creat[ing], edit[ing], program[ing], or distribut[ing] any application or software for use on a computer or an electronic device that is intended to enable individuals to obtain an abortion-inducing drug or to facilitate an individual’s access to an abortion-inducing drug.”
Due Process—LOL
The speech-infringing provisions in this bill are huge, and we’ll get to those in a minute. But first I want to point out a few especially wild provisions unrelated to speech.
One truly astounding provision says that if someone bringing a lawsuit can’t determine which manufacturer made the pill that’s the basis for their action, all abortion pill manufacturers can be held liable, with liability “apportioned among all manufacturers of abortion-inducting drugs in proportion to each manufacturer’s share of the market for aboriton-inducing drugs.”
I don’t know what else to say here but…what? This is not how U.S. law works. The authorities can’t just say, “Well, if we don’t know who violated the law, anybody in this category is guilty!”
Another bonkers provision say
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