A final social reform, and a signal sent to voters on the left: Parliament will vote on Wednesday to extend the abortion period, by adopting a text concocted by an opposition MP but supported by the majority.
The bill plans to extend from 12 to 14 weeks the legal deadline for voluntary termination of pregnancy (abortion) to respond to a lack of practitioners and the gradual closure of abortion centers.
It will be voted definitively on Wednesday followingnoon, via a final vote of the Assembly, at the end of a long parliamentary journey started in October 2020.
Presented by former LREM deputy Albane Gaillot, who has become an environmentalist, the transpartisan text was pushed by the president of LREM deputies Christophe Castaner.
Nothing was certain and this choice might be presented as a rare mark of independence of the LREM group vis-à-vis Emmanuel Macron, who has repeatedly expressed his reluctance on the subject.
“The atypical course of this bill is a lesson to be learned regarding the functioning of our institutions. It shows that we must ignore political labels. When an idea is good, it is neither right nor left “, told AFP Albane Gaillot, who will not stand for re-election in the next legislative elections.
According to the socialist deputy Marie-Noëlle Battistel, 2,000 women are forced each year to go abroad to be able to have an abortion because they have exceeded the legal deadlines. These are the “most vulnerable women, the very young, the furthest from the healthcare system, the women who have the least access to health information, those who have no means of transport or those who are victims of violence. “.
The bill also plans to extend the practice of instrumental abortion to midwives. “More numerous than doctors in France, they can already perform abortions by medication since 2016,” explains Ms. Gaillot.
Initially, the text planned to remove the “specific conscience clause” allowing doctors to refuse to perform an abortion. But this development has been scratched to allow the bill to advance in its parliamentary course.
The Minister of Health, personally in favor of extending the abortion period, had made it a prerequisite.
– “trauma” –
The head of state’s unequivocal positions seemed to torpedo the reform for a long time. Marking his opposition in an interview in July 2021, Mr. Macron had still estimated on his return from a visit to the pope this fall that “additional delays are not neutral on the trauma of a woman”. However, he added “respect(er) the freedom of parliamentarians”.
These remarks had earned him a volley of green wood from defenders of women’s rights and it was finally Christophe Castaner who decided to overturn the table, taking up the bill on behalf of the “walkers”. And this, before the government takes the last step by also including it on the agenda of the Senate.
A trophy for the LREM whose political center of gravity in the Assembly is deemed to lean to the left, at least on social issues.
This extension of the duration of abortion is one of the small pebbles sown at the end of the five-year term to give a more progressive orientation to the macronist balance sheet.
The bill bristles pro-life activists from the Vita Alliance and part of the right in the Senate and the National Assembly, which has given voice in the hemicycles and has tried parliamentary obstruction.
In an interview with ELLE magazine, the LR candidate for the Elysée Palace Valérie Pécresse deplored with the 14-week deadline “a headlong rush that distracts the gaze from the real problem: access to the abortion center, the absence of gynecologists and midwives (…) the free choice of women must be guaranteed”.
Poll following poll, the French continue to be overwhelmingly in favor of this right to abortion questioned elsewhere in Europe, especially in the East. In France, no candidate has planned to touch it.
