UPDATE, 3/4/2024: With a special session in Versailles, France has become the first country in the world to make abortion a constitutional right. Three-fifths of lawmakers were required to vote in favor of making it a “guaranteed freedom,” and that hurdle was easily cleared in a 780-72 vote.
Abortion was decriminalized in France in 1975, and is legal through 14 weeks of pregnancy. Though the constitution has now been formally changed to include abortion, preborn children will, at least for now, remain protected from abortion after 14 weeks of pregnancy. Pro-abortion lawmakers celebrated the vote, with Mathilde Panot, who introduced the bill in the National Assembly, calling it “a promise for all women who fight all over the world for the right to have autonomy over their bodies — in Argentina, in the United States, in Andorra, in Italy, in Hungary, in Poland. This vote today tells them: your struggle is ours, this victory is yours.”
3/1/2024:Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, promised to make abortion a constitutional right last year, and lawmakers have taken up that challenge. In January, the French National Assembly voted 493-30 in favor of a bill that would amend the French constitution to include abortion as a “right.” Now, the Senate has followed suit.
Wednesday, the Senate voted 267-50 in favor of the bill, which Macron applauded. “The Senate has taken a decisive step, which I applaud,” Macron said in a statement. “I pledged to make women’s freedom to have recourse to abortion irreversible by enshrining it in the Constitution.”
French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal further said the vote is an “immense step forward” that will mark “the political and parliamentary history of our country.”
Lawmakers additionally boasted about the vote. “We’re writing history,” La France Insoumise parliamentary group leader Mathilde Panot said. “The last lock has been broken. France will become the first state in the world to guarantee the right to abortion.”
Green Senator Mélanie Vogel likewise celebrated. “It’s no longer a battle, now it’s a victory, it’s an extraordinary message that France has just sent,” Vogel said. “To the French women and men who massively called for the constitutionalization of abortion, to all the women who have lived through the horror of the criminalization of abortion, to all the women who never want to experience it.”
Alliance VITA, a pro-life group, issued a press release earlier this year condemning the constitutional effort. “[T]he inclusion of abortion in the Constitution is not only unjustified and dangerous but is also totally disconnected from the social urgency,” they wrote, adding, “Alliance VITA calls on the government to face up to the reality of abortion by evaluating its causes and its consequences and by establishing a true preventive policy.”
Macron said he will now convene a joint session of the French parliament next week for a final vote.
There has been a massive increase in French abortions in recent years. In 2022, the country saw a record-high number of abortions, with over 234,000 abortions committed at a rate of 16.9 per 1,000 women of childbearing age — the highest since 1990.
