A visual from LFI on abortion outrages Simone Veil’s grandson, Mathilde Panot responds

The day after the vote of Congress, which recorded the inclusion of abortion in the Constitution, La France insoumise published a visual on which Simone Veil and the rebellious Mathilde Panot face each other.

Monday March 4, France made history, becoming the first country in the world to include voluntary termination of pregnancy (abortion) in its Constitution. In the wake of this historic vote, La France insoumise published a visual on social networks which did not go unnoticed. In the background, pro-abortion demonstrators and their signs, on which we can read slogans like “My body, my choice”. At the top of the poster and in white capital letters, the inscription “We did it!”. Finally, in the foreground, facing each other, Simone Veil, former Minister of Health who was tasked in 1974 by President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing with adopting the law decriminalizing abortion, and Mathilde Panot, president rebels in the National Assembly. In 2022, in reaction to the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States to annul the ruling which guaranteed access to abortion, Mathilde Panot was the first to draft a constitutional bill in order to include the abortion in the French Constitution, while a good number of elected officials, led by the majority, were still opposed to it.

Regardless, the poster quickly sparked reactions on social networks. “This face-to-face between the great lady who fought anti-Semitism all her life and the vulgar extremist who spends his time stirring up hatred of Jews within our Nation is infamous,” the MP lamented on X Renaissance Caroline Yadan, while the family of Simone Veil also reacted through the voice of one of her grandsons. “This rapprochement, what an indignity,” commented Aurélien Veil on X.

Reproaches to which Mathilde Panot did not fail to respond on . Having passed the first vote in the Assembly on constitutionalization on November 24, 2022. C. Having an extreme right which continues to be the worst enemy of women’s rights. D. Answer D?” A question accompanied by a photomontage of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who in the 1970s renamed the Veil law “anti-French genocide law”, facing his daughter Marine Le Pen, in 2024, of which “half of RN group in the National Assembly did not vote for the constitutionalization of abortion”, it is stated on the visual.

The rebel parliamentary group said it regretted all this controversy. At Figaro, those around her assure that “Mathilde Panot does not pretend to compare herself to Simone Veil”. And this same source further justifies: “The illustration features Mathilde Panot speaking to Simone Veil and telling her: ‘We did it’, a sign that the fight for women’s rights has continued for fifty years.”