CONSTITUTION. Emmanuel Macron has announced that he is working on a bill to revise the Constitution and engrave the right to abortion there. Some subtleties could complicate the inclusion of abortion in the text.
A new step towards the registration of voluntary termination of pregnancy (Abortion) in the Constitution. Several clues had been slipped and on March 8, 2023, Emmanuel Macron announced a bill to constitutionalize women’s recourse to abortion, “in the coming months”. The news, made during the national tribute to the activist Gisèle Halimi who had made the right to abortion one of her main fights, was welcomed by feminist associations. “It’s a big step towards securing the right to abortion in France and an exemplary step forward for the rest of the world”, reacted Sylvie Pierre-Brossolette according to comments reported by The world.
This is without counting on the other side of the coin which has upset these same feminist authorities. Emmanuel Macron had two options to defend the entry of the right to abortion into the Constitution and he chose the more difficult path: the bill will be included in an overall constitutional revision rather than by a specific text. Consensus will in fact be more difficult to find between parliamentarians depending on the measures that will accompany the inclusion of abortion in the Constitution. If this is an important step forward after the votes of the National Assembly and the Senate, there is still a long way to go before seeing this right engraved in stone.
New vote to include abortion in the Constitution
Already voted by Parliament – on November 24, 2022 by the National Assembly and on February 1, 2023 by the Senate -, the inclusion of abortion in the Constitution is preparing for a new parliamentary course. The parliamentarians’ proposal will become a constitutional revision bill carried by the government and submitted to the vote of Parliament, or rather one measure among a set of proposals. “In the coming months”, according to the timeframe given by the Head of State, a bill will be submitted to both chambers and will have to be voted on by a three-fifths majority to be adopted.
This new voting sequence should not pose a problem for the inclusion of abortion in the Constitution, but the presence of other measures in the constitutional revision bill, some of which would not achieve consensus – like the reduction in the number of parliamentarians or a return to the seven-year term – would put the constitutionalization of abortion in jeopardy. This is the fear of several political defenders of women’s rights such as the president of the LFI group in the Assembly, Matilde Panot: “A step forward that we owe to the mobilization of feminist associations who have been calling for it for years. Macron wishes to do so in a comprehensive constitutional review. We are asking him for a specific bill on the subject so that it can succeed!” And others like the rebellious deputy Damien Maudet to bid: “Register [cette mesure] in a global revision would only be a shameful instrumentalization: it would concentrate the debate on this subject in order to make us forget everything else”, reports the Huffpost. The Elysée defends itself from these accusations and assured the same media that “the overall constitutional bill [sera] developed in a search for a consensus similar to that already existing on the question of abortion.”
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From “right to abortion” to “freedom”, what will be written into the Constitution?
“The advances resulting from the parliamentary debates will allow, I hope, to include in our fundamental text [la] freedom [de recourir à l’IVG, ndlr] as part of the bill revising our Constitution”. With this statement made on March 8, 2023, Emmanuel Macron showed his preference for speaking of “freedom” rather than “right to abortion”. The State therefore lines up behind the Senate, which only adopted the inclusion of abortion in the Constitution after the substantial modification of the text induced by the amendment of Senator LR Philippe Bas, a former collaborator of Simone Veil.
While the deputies voted to add an article 66-2 to the Constitution stipulating that “the law guarantees the effectiveness and equal access to the right to voluntary termination of pregnancy”, the senators preferred the inclusion of this mention in article 34 of the fundamental text: “The law determines the conditions under which the freedom of the woman to put an end to her pregnancy is exercised”. A formulation which makes the law more acceptable according to Philippe Bas who explained: “There is no absolute right, there is a freedom already recognized and which we can write in the Constitution, but on the condition that there is a reconciliation between the rights of the pregnant woman to terminate her pregnancy and the protection of the unborn child after a certain period”.
Is the “freedom to resort to abortion” a consensus?
Left-wing groups continue to defend the inclusion as such of the “right to abortion” in the Constitution, “an essential condition for securing this fundamental right for the years to come”, according to the association Abortion in Europe, women decide nearby World. But senators find several advantages in the term freedom, in particular the fact that it leaves the field open to a modification of the Veil law, as was the case for the extension of the deadline for resorting to abortion in April 2020 or for its coverage by the Health Insurance voted a few years ago. Purposefully chosen examples.
Despite these arguments, politicians regret the replacement of the expression “right to abortion” by freedom, but the PS senator Laurence Rossignol explained in The Parisian prefer remember that “as long as the Constitution guarantees that abortion is a freedom, it is protected”. Voices are raised with more severity on the Bas amendment, such as that of Senator Mélanie Vogel who judges that the text “is not satisfactory, because nothing will one day prevent the legislator from regressing on the right to ‘abortion’. If on the form, the left finds fault, in substance, Philippe Bas’s amendment remains a solution to constitutionalize the right to abortion, a situation that Mélanie Vogel summarizes in a question, recalls the evening newspaper: ” Is it better to have an unsatisfactory step, but a step all the same, or no step at all? ?”