The text including abortion in the Constitution presented on December 13 to the Council of Ministers

2023-11-20 11:28:09

The right to abortion soon to be protected? The bill aimed at including voluntary termination of pregnancy (abortion) in the Constitution will be presented on December 13 to the Council of Ministers. A possible meeting of Parliament in Congress could then take place in March in order to ratify its adoption, according to several party leaders invited by Emmanuel Macron.

This text should be examined in Parliament in the first quarter of 2024. It will then be necessary for 3/5th of the deputies and senators, gathered during the Congress, to endorse the formulation, which aims to make abortion an “irreversible” right, according to the promise of the President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron.

Fears regarding the Senate

For the president of family planning, Sarah Durocher, this is “good news”. “Things are moving forward, it is a victory for the feminist movement and allied parliamentarians because we have been trying to get this right into the Constitution for a year and a half,” she reacted to AFP. “We hope that this will be the case in 2024 but we nevertheless have fears” regarding the Senate which “historically, votes very little on laws on abortion,” she added.

Emmanuel Macron announced on October 29 on social networks the inclusion in the Constitution in 2024 of the freedom of women to resort to abortion.

“Women’s freedom” rather than their “rights”

According to the explanatory memorandum of the draft constitutional law, which AFP obtained at the beginning of November, the following wording was retained: “The law determines the conditions in which the freedom of women is exercised, which is guaranteed, to have recourse to a voluntary termination of pregnancy”.

This formulation, we can read in the document, aims to ensure a “fair balance” between the positions of the two Assemblies, the Senate having approved in February the text of the National Assembly but including the “freedom of women” of “terminate her pregnancy”, rather than her “right”.