2024-01-24 23:53:00
This is a first step towards the inclusion of voluntary termination of pregnancy (abortion) in the Constitution. On the night of Wednesday January 24 to Thursday January 25, the deputies approved by a large majority the principle of including the “guaranteed freedom of women to have recourse to an abortion” in the Constitution.
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“Abortion is not a freedom like any other, because it allows women to decide their future,” said Minister of Justice Éric Dupond-Moretti at the opening of the debates.
After often bitter debates between the majority and the left on one side, and LR elected officials on the other, 99 deputies voted for the single article of the constitutional revision project. The presidential camp as well as the left-wing and Liot deputies present contributed their votes, like two LR deputies and two RN. Thirteen deputies voted once morest (4 LR, 8 RN and one non-registered).
A process that is still long and uncertain
The next meeting is set for Tuesday January 30. This decision will then have to be confirmed in the Assembly during a solemn vote, which leaves very little doubt.
It will then have to be adopted in the same terms in the Senate, a hypothesis still uncertain at this stage. Gérard Larcher, the president of the upper house, positioned himself once morest this inscription. “The Constitution is not a catalog of social and societal rights,” he declared. Finally, to be able to be ratified, this registration will be voted on via a congress bringing together the two chambers and requiring 3/5th of the votes.
A “historic victory”
“The law determines the conditions under which the freedom guaranteed to women to have recourse to” an abortion is exercised: through this formulation, the executive hopes to find a way between the Assembly, which voted at the end of 2022 an LFI text to enshrine a “right” to abortion, and the Senate, which narrowly validated a few months later the inclusion of a “freedom” in the Constitution.
“Our country cannot side with the United States of Donald Trump, or the Hungary of Viktor Orban. The crows are at our doors and we will not leave our bodies,” said environmentalist MP Marie-Charlotte Garin.
Despite regrets on the left over the abandonment of the term “right” or the absence of reference to contraception, Mathilde Panot (LFI) called for a “historic victory” over the “anti-rights [qui] sit […] to the extreme right. “There is no question of our political family calling into question access to abortion,” retorted Pascale Bordes (RN), criticizing an “inappropriate and useless” reform.
No “absolute and unlimited right”
The debates turned sour in the evening, particularly during the examination of LR amendments to return the legal period for abortion to 12 weeks (compared to 14 currently). Reproaching the majority for not committing once morest a hypothetical significant extension of the legal duration, Thierry Breton (LR) accused it of behaving as a “trailer of Family Planning”, causing a reaction on the left and among the Macronists.
Defending the association, “independent”, the Renaissance rapporteur Guillaume Gouffier Valente retorted that he had not seen “the slightest amendment requesting an extension” on the left or among the Macronists, but several which “attack access to right to abortion” coming from the right.
Basically, Eric Dupond-Moretti tried to respond to the LRs who see in the “guaranteed freedom” formula a breach for an extension of the legal duration, without the Constitutional Council being able to oppose it. The revision will not create an “absolute and unlimited right”, he insisted.
READ ALSO IVG: “Let’s not subject the Constitution to fashion phenomena”Invoking a “balance” of the Veil law between women’s freedom and “protection of the unborn child”, LR deputies pleaded to constitutionalize the “protection of human dignity” and the conscience clause of caregivers refusing to practice health care. ‘Abortion.
Risk of Senate blockage
In a deaf dialogue, the minister insisted that they were secured by decisions of the Constitutional Council, calling for respecting the “balance of the text”, but without succeeding in convincing them. Any change would have consequences on the schedule.
For a Congress to be convened, the Senate would have to approve on February 28 this notion of “guaranteed freedom”, which is raising eyebrows among executives on the right. And the senatorial right, reluctant to give gifts to the executive, had experienced as pressure the fact that the government suggested in December the date of March 5 to convene the Congress, which would suppose that the Senate approved the government’s drafting .
READ ALSO IVG: Macron’s moment of hypocrisy“We will take the time it takes to complete this review”, promised by Emmanuel Macron, tried to clear the mines on Wednesday. If the Senate once more passes a different version of the Assembly, the parliamentary shuttle would resume.
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