PARIS – With 267 votes in favor and 50 against, the French Senate approved the inclusion in the constitution of an article that guarantees the right of women to resort to abortion: «The law determines the conditions in which the freedom guaranteed to women is exercised woman to resort to voluntary termination of pregnancy”. «This evening the Senate wrote a new page on women’s rights, this vote is historic – commented the French Minister of Justice, Eric Dupond-Moretti -. We will be the first country in the world to enshrine in the Constitution the freedom of women to control their own bodies. This vote essentially reiterates to those who don’t yet know that women in our country are free.”
After this favorable vote, which was not a given given the conservative majority of the senators, all that remains is the passage of a final, solemn but now predictable vote of the chambers assembled on March 4th. Great satisfaction from President Emmanuel Macron: «I am committed to making women’s freedom to resort to abortion irreversible by inscribing it in the constitution. After the National Assembly, the Senate takes a decisive step.” And great satisfaction for the feminist associations: «A victory for all women who want to see the right to control their own bodies guaranteed», declared the Osez le féminisme association, with «a thought for the 47,000 women in the world who still die due to of clandestine abortion”.
Among the 50 senators against, belonging mainly to the right-wing Républicains party, many like the president of the Senate Gérard Larcher argued that the right to abortion in France was not questioned by anyone, unlike in the United States, and therefore it was useless and counterproductive to import divisions and debates that rage across the Atlantic, in many American states. But over the weekend an episode perhaps helped convince some that that right was not so uncontested after all, and that it was therefore better to guarantee it constitutionally. On Sunday, during a CNews broadcast (Vincent Bolloré’s popular TV network close to traditionalist and reactionary positions), a graph was broadcast which defined the interruption of pregnancy as «the main cause of death in the world, with 73 million deaths in 2022. Due to cancer, 10 million have died; and for tobacco, 6.2 million.” After protests from many viewers, the following day the network backtracked through the words of its most famous presenter, Laurence Ferrari – “we apologize to everyone and in particular to women” – and withdrew the video from its website.