Council of Europe Rewards Abortion Lobby
On 22 June 2026, at the opening of its Summer Plenary in Strasbourg, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) and the Government of Iceland awarded the 2026 Vigdís Prize (€60,000) for Women’s Empowerment to My Voice, My Choice, a cross-border abortion campaign movement.
A Political Signal That Silences Millions of Women
This award is not a neutral act. It is a political statement — one that elevates a single ideological agenda while systematically ignoring the lived realities of countless women across the European continent who are calling, urgently and repeatedly, for something entirely different: Help and freedom to avoid abortion, support for pregnancy and maternity.
Across EU Member States, civil society organisations working to support women facing difficult pregnancies operate without institutional backing, without European funding, and without recognition from bodies such as PACE. They answer phone calls in the middle of the night. They provide emergency housing, psychological counselling, legal guidance, and material assistance to women who want to continue their pregnancies but face overwhelming social and economic barriers. They do this largely alone, on minimal budgets, sustained by volunteers. Where is the prize for them?
Abortion Has Caused Profound Trauma to Millions of Women
The Council of Europe has chosen to celebrate a movement that frames abortion as an unqualified good and a marker of women’s empowerment. Yet this framing obscures an uncomfortable truth that European institutions consistently refuse to confront: abortion has caused, and continues to cause, profound psychological, emotional, and physical trauma to millions of women.
These women — who grieve, who experience post-abortion trauma, who carry their loss in silence for years, sometimes decades — are never placed on a stage in Strasbourg. Their experiences do not fit the narrative that powerful institutions have chosen to promote. They are erased.
True women’s empowerment cannot be reduced to the removal of a child. Genuine empowerment means giving women the real means to choose life — economic security, healthcare, housing, flexible working arrangements, psychological support, and a social environment that does not treat pregnancy as a burden to be eliminated. A prize awarded in the name of women’s empowerment that ignores all of this is not a prize for women. It is a prize for an ideology.
The Defending-Life and Freedom Civil Society Is Left to Advocate Alone
My Voice, My Choice gathered over 1.1 million signatures and secured a European Commission commitment to redirect existing EU funds toward abortion services. ONE OF US, by contrast, gathered over 1.8 million signatures — the largest European Citizens’ Initiative in the history of the mechanism — calling on the EU to cease funding for activities that destroy human embryos. The Commission rejected it. No prize was awarded. The contrast could not be more stark: one campaign is celebrated and institutionally rewarded; the other, the most popular among European citizens, is silenced by those, non-elected, who have for a while political power in Europe.
This award is the latest episode in a systemic pattern of abortion financing embedded at the heart of Europe. In February 2026, the European Commission authorised Member States to redirect European Social Fund Plus (ESF+) resources — funds intended for social inclusion, education, and employment — toward cross-border abortion services. This decision was made without any equivalent commitment to fund pregnancy support, maternal health, or defending-life civil society. Separately, according to data from the EU Funding and Tenders Portal, the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) has received recurring annual EU grants amounting to over 6 million between 2022 and 2025 alone — public money systematically directed toward an organisation whose primary mission includes the promotion and provision of abortion globally. And now, the Council of Europe adds a €60,000 prize to this landscape of institutionalised support.
Meanwhile, organisations that defend the right to life, support women in pregnancy, receive no equivalent institutional recognition, no European funding, and no place at the table when prizes are awarded for “women’s empowerment.”
The PACE President Petra Bayr said at the ceremony, those who campaign for “sexual and reproductive rights” face “a massive pushback from organisations that are well-equipped with resources.”
We must correct this mischaracterisation. It is not pro-life civil society that is well-resourced. The opposite is true. It is the abortion lobby that commands institutional funding, political endorsement, and now European prizes. The imbalance is not merely unfair — it is a democratic failure that strikes at the core of what European institutions claim to stand for.
“The Council of Europe was created on the conviction that human dignity is the foundation of all rights. Today, it has chosen to honour a movement that denies that dignity at its most vulnerable. We call on the Parliamentary Assembly and the Committee of Ministers to hear the voices that are never rewarded: the voices of millions of women across Europe who are asking not for abortion, but for the support and the freedom to bring their children into the world with dignity. These women exist. They are not statistics. We know them, through the silent day by day work NGO Members of One of us are doing every day in so many European countries. They are calling out to European institutions — and those institutions are not listening. ONE OF US European Federation demands that maternity support, pregnancy accompaniment, and the defence of the right to life be placed at the heart of Europe’s agenda for women — not as an afterthought, but as a political and moral priority. Ségolène du Closel, CEO, ONE OF US European Federation
Our Demand: Hear the Other Half of the Story
ONE OF US European Federation, which represents millions of European citizens committed to the protection of human life from conception, calls on the Council of Europe to:
• Open a genuine dialogue with women who have experienced trauma following abortion and who have never been given a platform in Strasbourg;
• Recognise and support defending both freedom and life civil society organisations that provide concrete, daily assistance to women facing difficult pregnancies;
• Women’s empowerment cannot mean a single, uniform outcome. Real empowerment is the freedom to give birth, and the guarantee that doing so will not mean facing poverty, abandonment, or silence.
