France has become the first country in the world to enshrine the right of women to have an abortion in the constitution, following a vote from MPs and senators who met in Congress at the Château de Versailles on Monday.
“All feminist victories are battles that seemed lost in advance […] “If you don’t give up, in the end you win”, said the ecologist Senator Mélanie Vogel, a leading figure in the fight for access to abortion.
Of the 902 members, 852 voted: 780 in favour and 72 against.
“France is showing the rest of Europe what it means to truly protect human rights,” Polish MEP Robert Biedron, chairman of the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM), told Euractiv.
The fight to enshrine abortion, initially led by feminist associations, follows the annulment in June 2022 by the US Supreme Court of the Roe v. Wade bill, which protected access to abortion at the federal level.
Recent attacks on the right to abortion in Europe, notably in Poland and Hungary, have heightened the fears of civil society and feminist associations that this right is under threat.
“Recently, we have seen that in many countries, like Poland or the US, the undemocratic movements try to attack and undermine women’s rights”, warned Biedron.
French MEP Sylvie Guillaume (S&D) agreed, telling Euractiv that “in the European Union, populist governments and political parties immediately attack women’s rights when they come to power”.
In Poland, since 2020, women have only been able to have an abortion in cases of rape or incest or when the woman’s life is in danger. In Hungary, since 2022, women have had to listen to the foetus’s heartbeat before having an abortion. Meanwhile, in Malta, abortion is illegal in almost all cases unless the woman’s life is in immediate danger.
It would be “pretentious” to believe that if the far right came to power in France, the right to abortion would not be threatened, said the Family Planning organisation at a press conference on Monday. “Let’s not be fooled”, warned its president, Sarah Durocher.
French EPP MEP Nathalie Colin-Oesterlé spoke of a “major step forward for women” on X.
Civil society, civil associations, MEPs and MPs – mainly from the left or the presidential majority – would now like to see the right to abortion enshrined in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, which brings together several rights that Member States must respect.
“It is now up to us to fight at the European level to ensure that access to abortion becomes a fundamental right in Europe”, French S&D MEP Aurore Lalucq told Euractiv.
“I hope that [ ] in the near future, we will see the right to abortion in the European Charter of Fundamental Rights”, Biedron agreed.
French President Emmanuel Macron, who qualified as “French pride” the outcome of the vote, himself had called for the right to abortion to be enshrined in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights during the French Presidency of the EU in 2022.
For Family Planning, “Europe can be a means of defending a policy of women’s rights, of defending sexual and reproductive rights”.
“We will continue to fight to enshrine the right to abortion in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights,” said La France Insoumise (LFI) MP Mathilde Panot during her speech to Congress.
Despite the vote’s victory, described as a “tidal wave” by Vogel, Family Planning also expressed its fear about the European elections, where the far right is leading in the polls.
(Clara Bauer-Babef | Euractiv.ft, edited by Alice Taylor)
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Source: euractiv.com
