Prime Minister Gabriel Attal declared this Monday afternoon that France had a moral debt “towards all women who “suffered in their flesh” from illegal abortions and welcomed a “fundamental step” which “will remain in the ‘History’, by opening the debates at the Versailles Congress to include the right to abortion in the Constitution.
The Prime Minister recalled the long march of activists to guarantee the right to abortion. “We give a second victory to Simone Veil and all those who opened the way,” he greeted, almost 50 years after the adoption of the law on the legalization of abortion in France.
France is “at the forefront, it is in its place”, welcomed the President of the National Assembly Yaël-Braun Braun-Pivet, stressing that she is the first woman in History to chair a Congress , the meeting of senators and deputies. “To the women of France, we say that we will never back down. To the women of the world, we say that we will support them and that we will always move forward alongside them,” she said.
In the solemn setting of the Palace of Versailles, Parliament, meeting this Monday afternoon in Congress, must vote to make France the first country in the world to explicitly include voluntary termination of pregnancy (IVG) in its Constitution.
“The law determines the conditions under which the freedom guaranteed to women to have recourse to a voluntary termination of pregnancy is exercised.” Introduced in article 34, the sentence should make France a pioneer, unlike several countries where the right to abortion is declining, in the United States or Eastern Europe.
Four days before March 8, International Women’s Rights Day, and the fiftieth anniversary of the passing of the Veil law which legalized abortion in France in 1974, the meeting of the Congress completes a long political battle initiated by the left, led by feminist associations and finally embraced by the government.