France to enshrine abortion rights in its constitution

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French lawmakers are poised to enshrine access to abortion in the country’s constitution in a global first that advocates of the move said was needed to prevent any future restrictions on reproductive rights.  

The 925 members of France’s two parliamentary chambers were set to meet on Monday at Versailles palace for a historic vote on the constitutional change that would add a specific article that guaranteed the “freedom . . . of women to have recourse to a voluntary termination of pregnancy”. 

The language will make it much harder for abortion rights to be limited, as it occurred in countries such as the US and Poland with the complicity of conservative governments, said Mélanie Vogel, a senator for the Green party who has co-led the effort.

“The message is that France considers that one condition of a free and equal society is that women can choose what to do with their bodies,” she said in an interview.

Asked if she feared that the rise of the far right in France would lead to restrictions on abortion access, she added it was impossible to predict so it was better to act now. 

“If you see a truck barrelling towards you, you don’t put on your seatbelt when it hits you. The French public is very attached to abortion rights so we have a window to do this now to prevent any backsliding.”

Abortion was made legal in France in 1975 in a proposal championed by health minister Simone Veil, a high-profile feminist politician who was honoured with burial in the Panthéon in Paris after her death in 2017.

Women can have the procedure up until the 14th week of pregnancy with costs covered by national health insurance. 

Making abortion a “guaranteed right” in the constitution caps a decades-long push from feminist groups and female politicians, which took on a new urgency when the US Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade, the legal decision that had previously enshrined a constitutional right to abortion, in May 2022. 

It was only then that President Emmanuel Macron reversed his earlier position that adding abortion rights to the constitution was not necessary and his government threw its weight behind a proposal filed by leftwing lawmakers, including Vogel.

The about-face mattered because the procedure to change the French constitution is much easier if the executive supports it, requiring only a three-fifths majority in both houses of parliament instead of a more cumbersome national referendum. 

The political surprise came last week when the more conservative chamber of parliament, the French Senate, voted for the change (267 votes for and 50 against) despite some of its leaders saying they thought it was not a good idea. The National Assembly had in January backed it by a wide margin of 493 to 30.

“When women’s rights are attacked around the world, France stands up and places itself at the forefront of progress,” wrote Prime Minister Gabriel Attal on social media platform X last week.

According to an Ipsos poll conducted in February, 78 per cent of French people supported adding abortion rights to the constitution to ensure they were protected in the future, with the figure rising to 86 per cent among women. 

None of the big political parties in France oppose abortion rights.

Religious groups and the Catholic Church had opposed adding them to the constitution, and expressed sadness at the outcome. CNews, a right-leaning television news channel controlled by conservative billionaire Vincent Bolloré, made waves last week when it broadcast a chart that cast abortion as the leading cause of mortality in the world, ahead of cancer and smoking. The channel later apologised for what it called an “unforgivable error”.

Far-right leader Marine Le Pen has at times made ambiguous comments about the procedure, such as in 2012 when she criticised so-called “abortions of convenience” and questioned if national health insurance should cover them. In a 2006 book, she wrote that “everything should be done” to minimise the number of abortions. 

But in January, Le Pen and 45 other MPs from her Rassemblement National party voted in favour of the constitutional change, while 12 opposed and 14 abstained. The party’s three senators also backed the change.