PARIS (Reuters) – French deputies on Thursday adopted by a large majority, 337 votes to 32, a bill from La France insoumise (LFI) aimed at enshrining the right to voluntary termination of pregnancy (IVG) in the Constitution. .
The Minister of Justice, Eric Dupond-Moretti, welcomed a “historic” vote while the president of the LFI group in the Assembly, Mathilde Panot, welcomed a decision which “speaks to the world”.
“By introducing abortion into the Constitution, France would be the pioneer nation in terms of women’s rights”, she declared.
During the long debate in the hemicycle, LFI withdrew from its proposal the inclusion in the Basic Law of the protection of access to contraception, in addition to abortion.
The text was notably approved by all the deputies on the left but also by the presidential camp, while the Renaissance group tabled a text along the same lines to be examined next week.
In her explanations of vote, the president of the Renaissance group, Aurore Bergé, mentioned her mother’s abortion “at a time when it was illegal in our country”.
“The question of access to abortion, the question of its protection, is not a whim, it is not a political gain, it is not a question of a political group”, he said. she declared. “This text becomes the text that must be able to succeed”.
The National Rally (RN) group said that Marine Le Pen could not take part in the vote for “medical reasons”.
Many Conservative MPs consider this registration unnecessary, believing that abortion is not threatened in France, protected by the law passed under the authority of Simone Veil in 1974 and many texts adopted since.
The defenders of constitutionalisation, on the contrary, highlight the challenges to this right in countries such as the United States and certain European countries such as Poland, Hungary and Italy, thanks to the arrival of the extreme right in power.
To modify the Constitution, a text must be voted in the same terms by the Assembly and the Senate. However, the latter, mainly on the right, rejected on October 19 a cross-partisan bill supported by the government to constitutionalize the right to abortion and contraception.
“Today we have paved the way for a debate in the upper chamber, a debate that involves us all,” said Sacha Houlié, president (Renaissance) of the Assembly’s Law Commission.
In 2021, 223,300 voluntary terminations of pregnancy were recorded in France according to the Department of Research, Studies, Evaluation and Statistics (DREES), a stable figure compared to previous years.
The National Assembly voted in February to extend from 12 to 14 weeks the legal deadline for resorting to an abortion.
(Report Elizabeth Pineau, edited by Sophie Louet)