The French president, Emmanuel Macron, proposed last March 8 to register the «freedom» of abortion for women in the Constitution, an initiative that already took its first steps in France in response to the Roe vs. Wade ruling in the United States.
The president announced the measure, which will be part of a bill on the revision of the Magna Carta in the «next few months», as part of a tribute to the deceased lawyer Gisèle Halimi, an icon of the fight for abortion.
«I want the force of this message to help us change our Constitution to enshrine the freedom of women to resort to the voluntary interruption of pregnancy,» Macron declared at the Palais de Justice in Paris.
In November, the deputies gave their approval to include abortion in the Magna Carta as a «right», but this proposal from the left was modified in the Senate (upper house), which approved its inclusion in February as a «freedom» .
The left-wing opposition had nonetheless asked Macron to present his own bill to speed up registration. The parliamentary initiative should have been submitted to a referendum.
As it is now a government project, the president will be able to opt instead for the two chambers, meeting together, to give the final approval by a three-fifths majority.
In France, abortion was decriminalized in 1975 by a law promoted by Simone Veil, a fighter for the emancipation of women and a survivor of the Holocaust. The latest modification in 2022 extended the terms to 14 weeks.
However, the so-called Bobigny trial had paved the way years before. In October 1972, this court acquitted a 16-year-old girl accused of having an abortion after rape and whose lawyer was Gisèle Halimi, who died in July 2020 at the age of 93.
The One Of Us European Federation denounces Emmanuel Macron’s obsession with turning abortion into a fundamental right. Public leaders must watch over the lives of their citizens and not promote death. Women’s rights begin with the right to recognition of their maternity and help for it. It is intolerable that from the presidency of a government women are pushed to abortion. Has Mr Macron listened to women and civil society who ask him to respect life? Has Mr Macron thought about the true individual freedom that goes through the possibility of choice life ? . Unfortunately, ideology is above reality and that neither the dignity of human life nor the dignity of women are present in that ideology.
