French lawmakers on Monday approved a bill that makes abortion a constitutional right in the country, a world first that has garnered overwhelming public support.
A congress of both houses of parliament gathered in a special chamber at the Palace of Versailles.
Prime Minister Gabriel Attal had urged lawmakers to make history, saying the freedom to abort remained “in danger”. “Our freedoms are in essence threatened… at the mercy of decision makers,” he said.
“In one generation, one year, one week, you can go from one thing to the opposite,” he added, referring to rights reversals in the United States, Hungary and Poland.
President Emmanuel Macron pledged last year to enshrine abortion — legal in France since 1975 — in the constitution after the United States Supreme Court in 2022 overturned the half-century-old right to the procedure, allowing individual American states to ban or curtail it.
In January France’s lower house of parliament, the National Assembly, overwhelmingly approved making abortion a “guaranteed freedom” in the constitution. The upper house, the Senate, followed suit on Wednesday.
When political campaigning began in earnest in 1971, “we could never have imagined that the right to abortion would one day be written into the constitution”, Claudine Monteil, head of the Femmes Monde (Women in the World) association, told AFP.
Monteil was the youngest signatory to the “Manifesto of the 343”, a 1971 petition that 343 women signed, admitting to having illegally terminated a pregnancy.
At the time, an estimated 700,000 to 800,000 women aborted each year.
Abortion was legalised in France in a law championed by health minister Simone Veil, a women’s rights icon granted the rare honour of burial at the Pantheon after her death in 2018.
Leah Hoctor, of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said France could offer “the first explicit broad constitutional provision of its kind, not just in Europe, but also globally”.
A majority of the French public support the move to give the right to abortion extra protection, according to polls.
A November 2022 survey by French polling group IFOP found that 86 percent of French people supported inscribing it in the constitution.
(With AFP inputs)
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