The Law Committee of the National Assembly gave its agreement on Wednesday January 17 for the inclusion of abortion in the Constitution. But the hardest part remains to be done. The bill must still be approved by the National Assembly and then the Senate.
This is an encouraging first step for the defenders of the project to include the right to voluntary termination of pregnancy (IVG) in the Constitution. The National Assembly’s law committee approved the project on Wednesday January 17, on the occasion of the 49th anniversary of the Veil law. If the bill should without much difficulty be adopted in the National Assembly on January 24, validation by the Senate and then, by a possible congress, remains uncertain.
While access to abortion is called into question in several countries such as the United States, the government’s text plans to include in the Constitution the fact that “the law determines the conditions in which the guaranteed freedom is exercised for the woman to have recourse to abortion. “I think that constitutionalizing abortion is once and for all and definitively putting forward legalization,” said Catherine Vautrin at the microphone ofEurope 1. The new Minister of Health, who positioned herself against a law protecting access to abortion in 2017, also declared that she had “evolved” on these issues.
On the right, the inclusion of abortion in the Constitution worries
However, the adoption of such a law is not certain. If the National Assembly adopted at the end of 2022 a text proposed by La France insoumise to guarantee “the effectiveness and equal access to the right to abortion”, the Senate, majority on the right, has already modified this text, evoking the “freedom of a woman to terminate her pregnancy”.
“We could fear that it would then become possible to require an abortion until its term or because of sex” and “this could lead to calling into question the conscience clause of caregivers”, assured Patrick Hetzel, deputy of Les Republicans of Bas-Rhin, although the rapporteur of the law indicated that “this bill does not create an enforceable right”, citing the opinion of the Council of State who considers that the text “does not call into question” freedom of conscience, underlines The world. In this context, the bill adopted by the law committee on Wednesday January 17 attempts to find a compromise between the two chambers. Tuesday January 16, the Minister of Justice, Éric Dupond-Moretti, praised a “balanced text”.