(Paris) Unlike many countries where the right to abortion is in decline, France will on Monday become the first country to explicitly include voluntary termination of pregnancy in its Constitution, an issue that has become consensual in public opinion and now in the political class.
Deputies and senators solemnly gathered in Congress in a wing of the Palace of Versailles should approve by a very large majority the modification of the Constitution proposed by the government of President Emmanuel Macron.
Four days before March 8, International Women’s Rights Day, this reform will introduce the following sentence into article 34 of the fundamental text: “The law determines the conditions in which the freedom guaranteed to women to have recourse is exercised to a voluntary termination of pregnancy.
A three-fifths majority of the votes cast is required to approve this change. It should be achieved without difficulty, after the massive votes of the Assembly (493 deputies against 30) and the Senate (267 votes against 50).
PHOTO STÉPHANE DE SAKUTIN, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
The vote of senators, which on Wednesday lifted the last obstacle to constitutionalization, surprised by its scale even the most fervent defenders of this inclusion.
The vote of senators, which on Wednesday lifted the last obstacle to constitutionalization, surprised by its scale even the most fervent defenders of this inclusion.
“The Senate has written a new page in women’s rights,” applauded the Minister of Justice Éric Dupond-Moretti, affirming that France would be “the first country in the world” to take such a step.
In fact, it will be “the first constitutional provision so explicit and broad on the subject, not just in Europe, but in the world”, according to Leah Hoctor, of the Center for Reproductive Rights, an American organization defending the right to abortion.
A tireless campaigner for this constitutionalization, Family Planning welcomed in advance the “message of hope” that the Congress will send “to feminists around the world”. “Because in France and throughout the world, the right to abortion is still seriously threatened,” the association underlined in a press release.
“Cultural battle”
This was demonstrated spectacularly with the cancellation in June 2022 in the United States of the ruling Roe v. Wade, which protected access to abortion at the federal level. Since then, many states have severely restricted or even banned abortion on their soil and thousands of Americans are forced to undertake painful and expensive trips to have an abortion.
This decision across the Atlantic had the effect of an electric shock on French public opinion and elected officials.
In November 2022, the Assembly largely adopted, with the support of the majority, a constitutional bill guaranteeing the right to abortion, presented by the radical left party LFI.
The Senate, more conservative and dominated by the right and the center, took up the issue in turn and voted by a narrow majority (166 votes against 152) in February 2023 for the inclusion in the Constitution of a “freedom” for women to have an abortion.
The following month, Emmanuel Macron announced his desire to include in the Constitution the “freedom” to resort to abortion, during a national tribute to feminist lawyer Gisèle Halimi.
The constitutional bill was finally presented on December 12. Proposing to include the “guaranteed freedom” of women to abort, a compromise wording, it was approved in both chambers, against the opinion of President LR (right) of the Senate Gérard Larcher.
The majority estimated that the “mobilization of civil society” and “popular pressure” – with polls showing support of over 80% for constitutionalization – had contributed to the massive adoption of the text.
Since the green light in the Senate, few hostile voices have been heard. The Conference of Bishops of France expressed its “sadness”, while on the far right, the head of the list of the Reconquest! at the European elections, Marion Maréchal, mocked a “legal gadget” intended to “please a small politicized minority”. Opponents of abortion announced a mobilization in Versailles on Monday afternoon.
In France, “we have won the cultural battle” in terms of abortion, conversely welcomed the environmentalist senator (opposition) Mélanie Vogel.
Voluntary termination of pregnancy (IVG) was legalized in France in 1975 by the Veil law, four years after a shock appeal in which 343 women, including actresses Jeanne Moreau and Catherine Deneuve and writers Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras and Françoise Sagan, had revealed that she had had an abortion.