The two parliamentary groups La France Insoumise and Renaissance recently tabled two bills aimed at including the right to voluntary termination of pregnancy in our Constitution. The National Assembly will examine the two texts separately, first that of LFI on November 24, then on November 28 with regard to the bill of the deputy Aurore Bergé.
A goal shared on the left
On November 9, the president of the Renaissance group came to present her proposal to the Law Commission.
.@auroreberge defends its bill aimed at enshrining the right to#abortion in the Constitution: “The national and especially international context poses an increasingly worrying threat to the right to abortion and requires this additional protection”. #DirectAN pic.twitter.com/3TUQI85cCX
— LCP (@LCP) November 9, 2022
According to the latter, the objective of this text, adopted by the Commission, is not to modify the current state of the right to abortion in France, but to constitutionalize it in order to guarantee it to future generations.
“Neither for the symbol, nor for political expediency”the international context and in particular the recent agitation around the Roe vs. Wade decision on the other side of the Atlantic has led the member for the tenth constituency of Yvelines to say that a threat indeed hovers over the right to abortion and “that it is up to us today to take this decisive step together”. It also acknowledges that it pursues the same objective as LFI on this subject.
The National Rally considers that “the right to abortion is not threatened in France” as underlined by Pascale Bordes, MP for the third constituency of Gard. “We are not the United States and no party is considering changing our laws.” estimated Marine le Pen at the end of June. For its part, the LR group is concerned about a right to abortion which tends to become unconditional, potentially “until the end of the termof a pregnancy.
To the test of the Senate and the referendum?
Article 89 of the Constitution provides that such an amendment [de la Constitution] at the initiative of parliamentarians is possible, provided first that the Senate and the National Assembly agree, then that the proposal is submitted to a referendum.
First problem: the Senate has already rejected a similar text last October. And if, however, one of the bills emerged as a winner from the hemicycles, it is still not certain that it will not be nipped in the bud by the popular vote.
However, our institutions are never very comfortable with the idea of a referendum. The President of the Republic can always regain control of a proposed constitutional law and make it a bill on his own initiative in order to avoid this exercise, unless in fact it is the LFI text that would be adopted by Parliament, in which case this institutional sleight of hand would seem quite perilous…