Lawmakers in France approved a bill to preserve the right to an abortion in the country's constitution on Monday. It’s the first constitutional right of its kind in the world, according to CNN, and comes as a response to the rollback of Roe vs. Wade in the United States.
Members of both houses of parliament gathered for a joint session at the Palace of Versailles and approved the measure 780-72. "I made a commitment to make women's freedom to have an abortion irreversible by inscribing it in the constitution," French President Emmanuel Macron said on X after the Senate voted to approve the bill last week.
Abortion was decriminalized in France in 1975, after a campaign led by the Health Minister at the time, Simone Veil, an Auschwitz survivor and one of the country's most famous feminist icons. Leading up to the recent vote, French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal addressed the more than 900 lawmakers gathered in Versailles, and called on them to set an example for countries around the world. “We have a chance to change history,” Attal said in an impassioned speech. “Make Simone Veil proud,” he said to a standing ovation.
The Macron administration set out to expand abortion rights in 2022, expanding the legal timeframe for an abortion from 12 weeks to 14 weeks, and permitting abortions up to the seventh week of pregnancy via telemedicine. Those moves were a direct response to France’s alarm as the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and states began to eliminate abortion access, according to the Washington Post.
Although the decision was widely supported by the people of France as well as all of its major political parties, the move was not without critique. Pascale Moriniere, the president of the Association of Catholic Families, said, “We imported a debate that is not French, since the United States was first to remove that from law with the repeal of Roe v. Wade. There was an effect of panic from feminist movements, which wished to engrave this on the marble of the constitution.”
Stateside, in a rare interview with The New Yorker published the same day as France’s historic move, President Biden described a vague plan to protect abortion access, saying he would “pass Roe v. Wade as the law of the land.” Biden continued, saying, “I’ve never been supportive of, you know, ‘It’s my body, I can do what I want with it,’ but I have been supportive of the notion that [Roe] is probably the most rational allocation of responsibility that all the major religions have signed on and debated over the last thousand years.”
