The lower house of the French parliament has approved a bill set to enshrine the right to abortion in the constitution, in what is a major step forward for the protection of reproductive rights in the country.
The change is one of the promises made by President Emmanuel Macron last year and is the first step in a legislative process that will still require a vote in the Senate in order to be passed.
On Tuesday night, the French National Assembly voted overwhelmingly in favour of amending Article 34 of France’s constitution to include that “the law determines the conditions by which is exercised the freedom of women to have recourse to an abortion, which is guaranteed.”
“Tonight, the National Assembly and the government did not miss their rendez-vous with women’s history,” Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti said.
Macron’s government is aiming to get the constitutional amendment passed by both chambers of parliament before getting it approved by all legislators in three-fifths majority of a joint session of parliament.
In October, the French president said that his government would aim to make abortion rights constitutional by the end of the year. “In 2024, the right of women to choose abortion will become irreversible,” he wrote on his socials.
A 2022 opinion poll from France showed that 89 per cent of respondents wanted abortion rights to be legislated under the constitution.
Earlier this month, an anti-abortion “March for Life” rally took place in Paris, with numbers soaring to 15,000, according to the organisers.
Abortion in France was decriminalised over half a century ago, however there remains nothing in the constitution that guarantees abortion rights. If the latest constitutional amendments is passed, France will have a vastly superior approach to women’s reproductive rights compared to its surrounding countries: in Poland, pregnancies can only be legally aborted in cases of rape, incest or a threat to the mother’s health or life. Even in cases of severe fetal deformities, the Polish constitutional court ruled that women are not allowed to access abortion.
In 2022, Hungry’s far-right government tightened abortion access, requiring women to “listen to the foetal heartbeat” before they can access the procedure.
In Italy, a group of anti-abortion organisations have sought to enshrine a similar rule, collecting over 106,000 signatures in December in an attempt to force women to listen to the ‘foetal heartbeat’ before undergoing the procedure.