Brussels, 10.7.2023.
The European Parliament, meeting in plenary, approved the Directive to combat violence against women and domestic violence. The directive is a clear win for ideologies that have manipulated the whole process, over democracy and the rule of law but especially is a missed opportunity for European women.
The President of the One of Us Federation, Marina Casini, is strongly committed to combating all forms of violence against women. However, she emphasizes the need not to use this directive as a means to promote ideological agendas that do not reflect the general consensus within European society, particularly regarding the termination of unborn children. Ms. Casini also emphasizes the importance of freeing women from the constraints and pressures that lead them to choose abortion. According to many women who have experienced abortion, it is seen as a defeat for the woman herself. Ms. Casini calls for a careful analysis of the directive to ensure that it remains true to its initial objective and respects the democratic values on which the European Union is based.
The text approved is significantly different from the one voted by the European Council last 16 June, the result of a long work, which started on 8 March 2022, of the European Parliament, and other European institutions.
The vote in the FEMM (Committee for Women’s Rights and Gender Equality) and LIBE (Committee for Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs) committee, lacking transparency (the documents were only made public at the last moment before the vote), the public debate before the vote was rushed and compromised, led to today’s summary, lack of transparency (not in the agenda) and perhaps ill-informed acceptance in plenary.
This ideological and non-transparent procedure has been accepted today for the trialogues (discussions between the three European Institutions) which is normally an even less transparent procedure.
The European Parliament’s way of working is actually an attempt to legislate on a domain that is clearly outside the competence of the European Union. The European Commission’s proposal, which has its legal basis on articles 82 and 83 of the TFUE (treaty on the functioning of the European Union), was already overstretching the legal base on judicial cooperation on issues having transborder aspects. However, after the modifications made by the European Parliament, this proposal for a directive is way wider so completely outside its competence.
According to the directive, it is violence to ‘prevent or attempt to prevent the voluntary termination of pregnancy’, despite the fact that women are often pressurized to ‘choose’ to give up their child by aborting it. Women who are forced to ‘choose’ to have an abortion because they are lonely, because their partner, employer, family, friends, the state, society, because they have no money, risk not being able to find acceptance and help from all those realities that make themselves available to provide a concrete alternative to giving up their child through abortion.
The One of Us Federation stands by the side of all women of all nations, from the time they are babies in the womb, and speaks out against all violence against women; it points out that abortion is not a right, but rather a violent act against women that hurt their bodies and their intimacy; expresses its strong concern about the anti-democratic drift of this directive, which by manipulating the sensitive issue of violence against women, obliges states to introduce abortion without limits in their legislation, violating EU legislation itself; finally, points out that this legal text could introduces dangerous discrimination against women, conceived children, and all those pro-life associations that help women.
One of Us, recalling that the EU helpline for women victims of violence is 116 016, reiterates that women have the right to live free from violence, including procured abortion.
