why the Senate could delay the inclusion of the right to abortion in the Constitution

Senator LR Philippe Bas introduced an amendment which modifies the wording of the constitutional bill voted in January by the deputies. However, if the text is modified in the upper house, it will go back for a new reading in the Assembly.

All eyes are on the Luxembourg Palace on Wednesday February 28, where senators will vote on the inclusion of voluntary termination of pregnancy (abortion) in the Constitution. This is the most perilous stage of the constitutional revision promised by Emmanuel Macron. The executive will not be able to bring it to fruition without a majority vote of the 348 senators. And even in this eventuality, the parliamentary timetable for the text could be disrupted.

To understand the current obstacle, we must look at the path to a constitutional revision, which is broken down into three stages: the vote on the text by the National Assembly or the Senate; then the vote on the same text by the other chamber of Parliament; and finally adoption by Parliament as a whole, meeting in Congress. For now, the first third of the legislative journey has been completed. The national assembly in fact widely approved, at the end of Januarythe principle of including in the Constitution the notion of “guaranteed freedom” for women to access abortion.

“Freedom” or “guaranteed freedom”?

The second stage therefore takes place on Wednesday with the examination of the text in the Senate. But before the vote, a Les Républicains (LR) senator, Philippe Bas, tabled an amendment on Monday with the aim of modifying the text, which currently includes a single article : “The law determines the conditions under which the freedom guaranteed to a woman to have recourse to a voluntary termination of pregnancy is exercised.” With this amendment, exit “guaranteed freedom” women, to keep only the “freedom”.

It is this single term of “freedom” which was present, in February 2023, in a previous text which was difficult to adopt by the Senate. The government then chose the wording “guaranteed freedom” in the draft constitutional law that he submitted to the deputies. “This amendment aims to remove the legal uncertainties which weigh on the use of the term ‘guarantee’”writes Philippe Bas to defend this change. Word “guarantee” would create an enforceable right of which “we don’t know the consequences”argues the rapporteur of the text, Senator LR Agnès Canayer, to the media Politico.

If Philippe Bas’ amendment is adopted by the Senate, with a right-wing majority, the constitutional bill will therefore be modified. If this is the case, it will be impossible to bring together parliamentarians in Congress to complete the third stage since the text must be adopted in exactly the same terms in both chambers. It would therefore leave for a new reading in the National Assembly, on an unknown date.

Uncertainty over senators’ vote

Will this modification proposed by the senatorial right be adopted? Before the vote in the hemicycle, the Senate Law Committee voted in favor of the National Assembly’s formulation on February 14. But “impossible to know” the option that right-wing parliamentarians will choose on Wednesday, anticipates a senator LR. “But social and media pressure is strong and many of our senators want to turn the page as quickly as possible. Whatever they think about it.”

“SOn abortion, we were helped a lot by CNews”, estimates Sacha Houlié, Renaissance president of the law committee at the National Assembly. On the news channel owned by Vincent Bolloré, abortion was presented on Saturday as “the leading cause of death in the world”. The sequence in question was widely relayed and criticized on Monday, while the leaders of CNews apologized.

On the eve of the vote, the Women’s Foundation gathered 95,000 signatures for a petition entitled “Mr. Larcher, vote for abortion!”. The President of the Senate, Gérard Larcher, declared himself opposed to this constitutionalization on January 23 on franceinfo. He justified his position by stating that “the Constitution is not a catalog of social rights”. At this stage, according to information from France Télévisions, the Congress meeting in Versailles (Yvelines) should be held on Monday March 4 at the beginning of the afternoon, if and only if the Senate votes on the same text as the Assembly on Wednesday.