“What we owe to women who wish to have access to abortion is that it be simple,” declares Aurore Bergé

The Minister Delegate for Equality between Women and Men wants to increase “support for first aid and women’s information centers”, she declared on Friday.

Invited on Friday March 8 on franceinfo, the Minister Delegate in charge of Equality between women and men, Aurore Bergé, indicated that “what we owe to women who wish to have access to abortion is for it to be simple, because it is a medical act which is now enshrined in our Constitution and which must be protected and guaranteed everywhere”. In the morning, alongside Emmanuel Macron, she will attend the public ceremony to seal the constitutional law of March 8, 2024 relating to the freedom to resort to voluntary termination of pregnancy. “It’s a big day. It’s March 8, International Women’s Rights Day and on this day, France will be the first country in the world to include abortion in this Constitution”, underlined the minister. But, “this does not mean that we must not guarantee the effectiveness of rights”.

The minister announced that she would “meet all search engines” because there are “hindrances” on the Internet, “despite the law”. THE “sites that want to make women feel guilty, disincentivize women, misinform women come out on top,” she lamented. She therefore wants search engines to review their referencing “because it has to be information and not disinformation”. The minister recalled that anti-abortionists always seek to “hinder” this right. “Again this week, the Strasbourg Family Planning center was attacked”she protested.

Accentuate “support for first aid and women’s information centers”

To ensure “effectiveness” of the freedom to resort to abortion, the minister wants to accentuate the “support for first aid and women’s information centers”, like Family Planning. She praised the work of the centers which “receive and guide women and young girls anonymously and confidentially and who support them in their access to the law”.

Family Planning is calling for authorization to perform instrumental abortions in planning centers and sexual health centers, but Aurore Bergé was skeptical: “This is a discussion that we must have with the Ministry of Health. We must always guarantee the safety of the abortion process, particularly instrumental, because it remains a surgical procedure.” The minister also believes that “the extension to midwives is already an extremely important additional guarantee of the effectiveness of this right”. The decree of December 2023 which authorizes midwives to perform “instrumental” abortions will be rewritten because it currently requires the presence of four specialized doctors. “It was at the will of the legislators, it was a parliamentary provision that we wanted to introduce, I voted for it” but “it was very, too supervised”.

She specifies that “the decrees are being finalized by the Minister of Health”. They will be published “normally at the end of the month”. That “means that you go from a potential of 5,600 obstetrician-gynecologists who practiced surgical abortions to 25,000 midwives who will be able to practice it”welcomed the minister, while 17% of women have to change departments to have an abortion according to data from the Directorate of Research, Studies, Evaluation and Statistics (Drees). “We have a subject of medical demography on this profession as on many professions, whether obstetrician-gynecologists or midwives”replies Aurore Bergé.