Fifty years ago, on January 17th, 1975, the Veil law was passed by the French National Assembly, decriminalising abortion for women and for the doctors who perform them. In 2024, abortion was enshrined in the Constitution. Although the measure passed in 1975 was initially intended to be temporary, it ended up being set in stone in the constitution of the French state. The moral pressure of progressivism is making it increasingly difficult to question these issues. At a time when the birth rate is plummeting every year, is it possible to reverse the trend?
On January 17th, 1975, the National Assembly adopted the so-called ‘Veil law’, named after the minister, Simone Veil, who supported the bill. The vote came after stormy debates at a time when abortions in France were not taken for granted. Veil, a former Auschwitz deportee, enjoyed a personal aura that played a major role in the final vote: her choice to support a bill that was hotly contested at the time was no accident.
An important clarification: in 1975, the law decriminalised, not legalised abortion. In other words, it did not create a right to abortion but an exception to the law: abortion was no longer subject to prosecution or punishment, either for women or for doctors. The first article stated that “the law guarantees respect for every human being from the beginning of life. This principle may not be infringed except in cases of necessity and in accordance with the conditions defined by this law.” In 1975, the law was adopted on an experimental basis, for a period of five years.
However, we know that when it comes to the so-called societal advances sought by the progressive Left, the temporary has a long life. Seen as an intangible achievement, abortion has become firmly entrenched in France’s health and political landscape, never to budge again. In 1982, abortion was included in the reimbursements funded by the French social security system. Even today, while some pregnancy-related medical procedures are reimbursed at only 70%, abortion is covered at 100%. In 1993, the ‘offence of obstruction’ (délit d’entrave) was created, designed to punish anyone who put forward alternative views on abortion and tried to dissuade a mother from having recourse to it.
In the 2000s, a number of legislative provisions made abortion even more commonplace: gradual extension of the legal time limit for abortion; exemption from parental authority for minors; abolition of the cooling-off period; extension of the offence of obstruction to cover information on the conditions for abortion; promotion of medical abortion.
The culmination of this journey was the inclusion, on March 8th, 2024, of “the freedom guaranteed to women to have recourse to a voluntary interruption of pregnancy” in the French Constitution.
At the end of this dramatic evolution, are there any further developments to be expected? Campaigners for abortion are never satisfied and are always asking for more. The extension of the time limit for performing an abortion—up to 24 weeks of pregnancy for some, the age at which it is now possible to save a premature baby—is one of their demands, as is the abolition of the fragile conscience clause that still allows some practitioners—and still not all—to refuse the procedure. Nor are the activists content to restrict themselves to the national level, but intend to push their agenda to the European level.
In the space of 50 years, abortion, initially described as a ‘tragedy’ by Simone Veil, has become a ‘freedom’ enshrined in the Constitution and adorned with every virtue. And the number of abortions continues to rise, year after year. More and more, but that doesn’t stop the most rabid feminists from claiming that the ‘right to abortion’ is under threat from a clique of reactionaries inspired by Donald Trump.
Against this implacable and seemingly inescapable logic, the March for Life gathers every year on the third Sunday in January, close to the anniversary of the vote on the law., It’s all very well for the mainstream press to describe the March for Life as a den of extremists: it has nonetheless become a force to be reckoned with and is featured in a large number of media outlets. Even the left-wing newspaper Libération was impressed by the minute’s silence in memory of the victims of abortion since the vote on the Veil law, saying: “There are situations in which sixty seconds can seem like an eternity. Like when … several thousand people stand in silent remembrance of the ‘10 million unborn babies in France’.”
Whatever the opinion of those who see the march as a gathering of “Trad-Catholics,” the message conveyed by the March for Life is no less topical. It is, in the words of former MEP and conservative minister Philippe de Villiers, “a march for survival.” There are two recent statistics on this subject. On the one hand, there has been a steady rise in the number of abortions over the last few years, with a record 243,623 abortions carried out in 2023 (the figures for 2024 have not yet been made public). On the other hand, we can observe a constant and steady collapse of the French fertility rate, with a record low of 1.62 children per woman in 2023—a level comparable to that of 1919, when France emerged from the First World War bled dry and bereft of its war-dead men.
For Nicolas Tardy-Joubert, president of the March for Life, it is shocking that no one has made “the link between the number of abortions carried out in France and the drop in the birth rate.” And yet, there is no coincidence: everything is being done today to encourage women in difficulty to have an abortion. Surveys have shown that women in economic distress are often forced to choose abortion, and not for the more defensible reason of ‘the freedom to control one’s own body.’
But the subject has become so taboo among French politicians that the idea itself seems inconceivable: instead of addressing the declining birth rates, there appears to be a greater electoral advantage in promoting immigration—while refusing to accept the long-term societal consequences of this choice.
