French right votes down move to make abortion constitutional right
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Version 0 of 1. Further proposals to be put before lower house next month after first attempt rejected in senate The French government has said it supports making the country the first in the world to enshrine abortion as a constitutional right, after the right-dominated senate voted down the left’s first attempt at a proposal. Several political parties in France, from the left to the centrist lawmakers of Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, began pushing for abortion rights to be written into the constitution after the US supreme court’s decision in June to overturn the landmark Roe v Wade ruling, which recognised a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion and legalised it nationwide. Two proposals for France to give unprecedented constitutional protection for the right to abortion are scheduled to be put before the national assembly, the parliament’s lower house, next month. But on Wednesday night, rightwing senators from the Républicains party voted against the first attempt at a proposal in the the senate. At times, the debate was heated. Stéphane Ravier, who left Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National to join the Reconquête party led by the former TV pundit Éric Zemmour, said the proposal was an attack on life, “a waste of time”, “dangerous, useless”, and a piece of “agitprop”. The justice minister, Éric Dupond-Moretti, present in the senate, told Ravier: “Imagine you reach power one day, I think the right to abortion would be seriously threatened in this country”. He said the government would support all the parliamentary proposals to make abortion a constitutional right. Mélanie Vogel, a senator for the French green party, Europe Écologie-Les Verts (EELV), who authored the senate proposal, said that the need to protect abortion was not just a reaction to the threat to abortion rights in the US: “This is also about Europe – abortion rights have been pushed back in Poland and Hungary and could be at risk in Italy. If France enshrines abortion as a constitutional right, that would send a very strong message to all the feminist movements across the world who are either fighting for this right or to stop it being pushed back. It would show that a path of progress is possible, not just regression.” An Ifop poll for the Fondation Jean Jaurès thinktank this summer found that 81% of people from across the French political spectrum wanted abortion rights to be better protected under the constitution. Writing abortion rights into the constitution is seen as a way of protecting the law that decriminalised abortion in France in 1975. Macron’s prime minister, Élisabeth Borne, said this summer: “For all women, for human rights, we must engrave this acquired right in stone.” If the government gets behind a bill, it would need careful drafting and approval by both houses of parliament to avoid being put to a referendum. Earlier this year, the parliament voted to extend France’s legal limit for ending a pregnancy from 12 to 14 weeks, amid anger that thousands of women were forced to travel abroad each year to terminate pregnancies in countries including the Netherlands, Spain or England. |