On March 4, 2024, a joint session of France’s parliament voted 780-72 to revise France’s constitution to include a “guaranteed freedom” for abortion. This happened after a majority of the French senate voted last Wednesday to accept the wording of the amendment of article 34 of the constitution. Now France has become the first country to enshrine abortion in their constitution.
The amendment states, “… the law determines the conditions by which is exercised the freedom of women to have recourse to an abortion, which is guaranteed.”
President Emmanuel Macron posted on X (formerly Twitter) in October 2023, “In 2024, women's freedom to have an abortion will be irreversible.” The 2022 overturning of Roe V. Wade in the US increased Macron’s urgency to see this added to the French constitution.
Pro-life supporters showed their disapproval of abortion in January 2023 during the La Marche pour la Vie (March for Life) rally. According to the event’s organizers, more than 20,000 people attended.
Ahead of Monday’s deciding parliamentary vote, Nicolas Tardy-Joubert, the president of La Marche pour la Vie, said to Evangelical Focus, “The right to kill cannot become a supra-legislative rule, a constitutional right.”
Some see this amendment as “superfluous” because abortion has been legal in France since 1975. Passage of this law also, “will not increase the financial resources of family planning centers. It will not combat medical desertion,” explained Senator Agnès Canayer in an interview with Public Sénat television.
But the Minister of Justice Éric Dupond-Moretti noted in an article in Evangelical Focus that “... including the right to abortion in the Constitution has symbolic power.” Senator and Co-chair of the European Green Party Mélanie Vogel, agreed and said in an interview with the Guardian, “This is a historic, feminist victory.”
The French Evangelical Protestant Committee for Human Dignity (CPDH) believes that this addition to the Constitution authorizes, “a death penalty for unborn children.” CPDH President Franck Meyer mentioned to Evangelical Focus, “The idea that abortion would become a fundamental freedom defended by the French Constitution (in the same way as freedom of expression or of worship), would be a serious decision that could reduce to nothing the value of prenatal human life and probably of life in general.” He added, “A Constitution is not meant to assert a particular interest but to serve the general interest.”
In October 2022, the proposal for the enshrining of abortion in the constitution was rejected twice by the Senate Law Commission. The commission wrote in a press release: “The purely proclamatory and symbolic approach, desired by the authors of the text, is not in keeping with the spirit of the text of the 1958 Constitution … it puts a subject at the heart of the news on which there is no question.”
Concerning the wording of this law, Meyer stated that it reads as a very, “... totalitarian position that does not allow any reasonable evaluation. It is the very example of an ideological isolation that forbids any intellectual and factual questioning.”
In mid-January, the CPDH released a statement asking abortion opposers to pray. “Let us pray for deputies and senators, that God will open their eyes to the realities of abortion and its serious consequences for society as a whole.”
According to Statista, the French healthcare system registered 223,282 performed abortions in 2021. This places France as the 5th European country with most openness to abortion. That number has increased to 234,300 in 2022.
According to French law, a woman’s abortion can be carried out under the condition that the woman’s health is in severe danger. However, in July 2020 an amendment was added so that women can get an abortion up until the ninth month, if under psychosocial distress.
Concerning this Meyer commented, “... this amendment will be presenting abortion as the answer to any problem a woman could face during her pregnancy.” He added, “Children who are in good health would be at risk of being eliminated to solve psychosocial problems!”
