New abortion legislation unveiled in the Utah Senate would eliminate rules that women be provided with a brochure and 1980s-era video on the procedure, replacing those materials with an interactive “information module” to be viewed on a digital tablet.

Senate Bill 118, sponsored by Sen. Todd Weiler, R-Woods Cross, also says doctors or other medical professionals who don’t provide the materials and certify a woman has viewed them could face a class A misdemeanor.

SB118 also adds requirements that the Utah Department of Health report any physician who does not comply with the new rules module — or other abortion law provisions — to the Utah Division of Occupational and Professional Licensing, which oversees licensing for the state’s doctors.

In addition, the bill directs state health officials to “pursue all administrative and legal remedies” against physicians who don’t comply.

SB118 passed unanimously out of a Senate committee late Wednesday, and now heads to the Senate floor.

Weiler said his proposal would eliminate the need for a half-hour abortion video produced by the state in the 1980s, which the senator said “no one watches” and is no longer accurate.

The video shows a fetal heartbeat and incremental stages of pregnancy, while also telling viewers about adoption and state support. “The state of Utah encourages anyone contemplating an abortion to consider childbirth and adoption as preferred alternatives,” the video’s narrator says at one point.

Weiler said Wednesday the tablet-based new information module would need to be viewed in the clinic, eliminating interactions with abortion clinic employees who before provided a scripted statement about abortions, printed resources and the video.

In Utah, a woman must wait 72 hours between her initial consultation and receiving an abortion.

Last summer, Weiler said, he met with three women who had visited abortion clinics and found the presentations were “very sarcastic.”

Weiler said he was offended by this, and did not appreciate Planned Parenthood employees or other medical workers telling women that “the Legislature requires us to tell you this. The Legislature requires us to tell you that.”

The module, he said, would last about 15 minutes and instead allow women to absorb the information in an “accurate and neutral manner.”

The module, like the existing video, would be required to “present adoption as a preferred and positive choice,” and would be “produced in a manner that conveys the state’s preference for childbirth over abortion,” according to the bill. The Department of Health also would be required to maintain a public website with similar information.

The bill would require the Department of Health to release the module, which legislators would sign off on, before 2019.

Representatives from several conservative groups said Wednesday they strongly supported the legislation, including Pro Life Utah, the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and Family Watch International.

Heather Stringfellow, vice president of public policy at Planned Parenthood of Utah, said SB118 would change how it delivers its state-mandated “informed consent” information about abortions to women, but not the medical consultation a woman receives at a clinic prior to an abortion.

The proposed legislation “doesn’t really change the fact that state-mandated informed consent does little to reduce the number of abortions in the state of Utah,” Stringfellow said. Planned Parenthood would comply with the proposed change, “but objects to the idea in general.”

Utah legislators, who over the years have enacted some of the strictest abortion laws in the U.S., also are considering a bill this session that would ban a doctor from providing an abortion if the woman’s sole reason is that the fetus has tested positive for Down syndrome.

A legal review found such a law would likely be found unconstitutional, but the legislation — HB205 — continues to move forward.

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