2024-03-04 18:36:00
(CNN) — France on Monday became the first country in the world to enshrine the right to abortion in its Constitution, culminating an effort that began as a direct response to the United States Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Lawmakers in both chambers of the French Parliament voted 780 in favor of the measure and 72 against, easily surpassing the three-fifths majority needed to amend the French Constitution.
Monday’s vote, held during a special meeting of lawmakers at the Palace of Versailles, southwest of Paris, was the final step in the legislative process. The French Senate and National Assembly overwhelmingly approved the amendment earlier this year.
The amendment establishes that in France there is a “guaranteed freedom” to abort. Some groups and lawmakers had called for stronger language to explicitly call abortion a “right.”
Lawmakers hailed the move as a historic way for France to send a clear signal of support for reproductive rights, at a time when abortion is under threat in the United States as well as in parts of Europe, such as Hungary, where far-right parties They have come to power.
Prime Minister Gabriel Attal declared before the vote that lawmakers owed a “moral debt” to women who, in the past, were forced to endure illegal abortions.
“Above all, we are sending a message to all women: your body belongs to you,” Attal said.
French President Emmanuel Macron said the government will hold a formal ceremony to celebrate the approval of the amendment on Friday, International Women’s Day.
France legalized abortion for the first time in 1975, following a campaign led by then-Health Minister Simone Veil, an Auschwitz survivor who became one of the country’s most famous feminist icons.
While in American politics abortion is a highly controversial issue that often divides parties, in France it has broad support. Many of the lawmakers who voted against the amendment did so not because they opposed abortion, but because they considered the measure unnecessary, given widespread support for reproductive rights.
The approval of the measure is a clear victory for the French left, which has been pushing for years to guarantee the right to abortion in the Constitution. Before 2022, President Emmanuel Macron’s government argued, as did current opponents of the amendment, that the measure was unnecessary.
However, in 2022, when the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade and left it to the states to decide the issue individually, France was pushed to act.
French Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti previously said, before the debate began in the National Assembly in January, that history was full of other examples in which “fundamental rights” were believed to be safe, but they were later eliminated, “as we have recently been reminded by the US Supreme Court decision.”
“We now have irrefutable proof that no democracy, not even the largest of them all, is immune,” he said.
The vote marks the 25th time that the French government has modified its Constitution since the founding of the Fifth Republic in 1958.
The Catholic Church was one of the few groups to announce its opposition to the amendment. The Pontifical Academy for Life, a Vatican body that deals with issues related to bioethics, said in a statement that “in the era of universal human rights, there can be no ‘right’ to take human life.”
On Thursday, a conference of French bishops also reiterated the Church’s opposition to abortion ahead of the vote.
CNN’s Joseph Ataman and Christopher Lamb contributed to this report.
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