Entry of the right to abortion into the constitution, bill on the end of life… Since his re-election, Emmanuel Macron and the executive have been thinking about the evolution of major subjects for the evolution of the rights of the French. However, the appointment of Catherine Vautrin at the head of an XXL Ministry of Labor, Health and Solidarity created a surprise. The former elected official from eastern France is indeed known for having positioned herself against marriage for all in 2013 and in 2017 against a law protecting access to abortion.
“It’s a question of honesty”
Now a member of the government of Gabriel Attal, the first openly homosexual Prime Minister, Catherine Vautrin said she “evolved” at the microphone of Sonia Mabrouk. “It’s a story that dates from 2013. Who in our society has not, on such personal, intimate subjects, evolved in the convictions that are their own? Eleven years later, we see things differently. And I think it’s an act of courage and honesty to say it,” confides the guest of the Great Europe 1-CNews interview.
“I was deputy mayor before resigning and as a civil registrar I personally carried out same-sex marriages, of friends and people I didn’t know, so I have no difficulty on the subject. And I say it again, I believe that it is a question of honesty to say yes, I have evolved”, continues the minister.
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A clean slate of the past
A mea culpa ? In 2017, when she was a deputy, Catherine Vautrin was also part of a list of parliamentarians who asked the Constitutional Council to censor a law protecting access to abortion. However, the government currently wants this right to be included in the constitution; project that she will have to carry out as Minister of Health and Solidarity. However, when she took office less than a week ago, the minister seems to have made a clean sweep of the past.
“My first words were to pay tribute to Simone Veil. Simone Veil was the president of my support committee when I led a first electoral campaign in Reims. Today is the 49th anniversary of the Veil law, on January 17, 1975. And it took half a century to get there, to engrave abortion in our Constitution,” she explained. “I think that constitutionalizing abortion is once and for all and definitively putting forward legalization,” believes Catherine Vautrin.