French lawmakers are poised to enshrine the right to abortion in the country’s constitution on Monday, marking a global first that has received widespread public support.
After initially facing opposition from the right-leaning Senate, a congress of both houses of parliament in Versailles beginning at 3:30 p.m. (1430 GMT) should find the three-fifths majority required for the move.
If Congress accepts the motion, France will be the only country in the world with a basic law that explicitly protects the right to abortion.
President Emmanuel Macron committed last year to incorporate abortion, which has been legal in France since 1975, in the constitution if the US Supreme Court abolished the 50-year-old right to the operation in 2022, allowing states to ban or restrict it.
In January, France’s lower-house National Assembly decisively endorsed making abortion a “guaranteed freedom” in the constitution, and the Senate did the same on Wednesday.
The plan is now anticipated to pass the final obstacle of a combined vote by both chambers during a rare joint session at the Palace of Versailles, the old royal palace.
Few predict a problem obtaining the required supermajority after the three-fifths mark was largely exceeded in both prior ballots.
When political agitation began in earnest in 1971, “we could never have imagined that the right to abortion would one day be written into the constitution,” Claudine Monteil, president of the Femmes Monde (Women in the World) organization, told AFP.
Monteil was the youngest signatory to the “Manifesto of the 343”, a 1971 French petition signed by 343 women who admitted to unlawfully terminating a pregnancy, along with up to 800,000 of their compatriots per year.
Abortion was legalized in France in 1975 under the leadership of health minister Simone Veil, who was honored with a tomb in the Pantheon in 2018.
However, another prominent feminist, Simone de Beauvoir, had told Monteil the previous year that “all it will take is a political, economic, or religious crisis for women’s rights to be called into question,” she recalled.
In this regard, “the behavior of the US Supreme Court did women all over the world a favor, because it woke us up,” Monteil stated.
According to Leah Hoctor of the Center for Reproductive Rights, France might provide “the first explicit broad constitutional provision of its kind, not just in Europe, but also globally”.
Chile included the right to elective abortion in a draft of a new progressive constitution for 2022, but voters rejected it in a referendum.
Some countries refer to the right.
The Cuban constitution protects women’s “reproductive and sexual rights”.
Several Balkan governments have also inherited sections of the former Yugoslavia’s 1974 constitution, which stated that it was a human right to “decide on the birth of children”.
Other states clearly mention abortion in their constitutions, but only allow it under certain conditions, according to Hoctor.
In the case of Kenya, the constitution states that “abortion is not permitted unless, in the opinion of a trained health professional, there is need for emergency treatment, or the life or health of the mother is in danger, or if permitted by any other written law” .
Making history?
The majority of the French people supports the measure to provide appropriate additional protection.
According to a November 2022 survey conducted by the French polling company IFOP, 86 percent of French citizens support inscribing it in the constitution.
Left-wing and centrist lawmakers have hailed the change, while right-wing senators have privately stated that they felt pressured to approve it.
One said her daughters would “no longer come for Christmas” if she opposed the change.
On Wednesday, Macron praised the Senate’s “decisive step” and promptly called for a parliamentary congress on Monday.
The last time a constitutional amendment was proposed was in 2008, when parliament had only recently passed broad reforms under former President Nicolas Sarkozy.
These measures included limiting a president’s tenure to two terms and strengthening safeguards for press independence and freedom.