On Thursday this week, the European Commission announced its support for the “My Voice, My Choice” European Citizens’ Initiative, while confirming that it will not allocate additional EU financial resources to facilitate cross-border abortion.
The Commission’s decision not to attach new funding mechanisms to this initiative is a welcome acknowledgement of the limits of EU competence. It signals an awareness that abortion policy remains outside the Union’s legislative authority and within the remit of member states. That restraint matters. Nevertheless, the support the Commission expressed for this pro-abortion initiative reveals biased political activism. Any efforts to promote abortion at the EU level violate its constitutional boundaries.
Attempts to advance an EU-wide abortion regime fall squarely outside the Union’s legislative competence. The EU may act only within the limits of powers conferred by the member states, and abortion liberalization is certainly not among them. The principle of subsidiarity—the idea that decisions should be taken as closely as possible to citizens, particularly in areas of profound moral and constitutional significance—is not a technicality but core to the European Project.
Laws protecting unborn life are deeply connected to a nation’s sense of moral order and right to democratic self-government. Every country has the right, and the duty, to uphold protections for the unborn. Without respect for this foundational human rights principle, the European project crumbles.
The initiative urges the EU to support access to abortion across member states, including by using existing EU instruments and funding mechanisms to facilitate cross-border access where national laws provide protections for unborn life.
To be clear, this ’Citizens’ Initiative’ in no way creates new EU competences. It merely required the Commission to consider the proposal and respond. Last December, the European Parliament adopted a non-binding resolution expressing support for the initiative. But, of course, political resolutions do not amend binding treaty law. What the Parliament should have done is firmly reject the proposal at that time.
Now, while the Commission insists, including during its press conference and with repeated reference to the EU treaties, that it is not overstepping its mandate, its political support for EU-level measures to advance the objectives of “My Voice, My Choice” tells a different story. Framing abortion access as an EU-level “right,” as the initiative does, encroaches on member states’ national sovereignty in practice. Even if health law remains formally within national authority, the Commission’s proposal to make use of instruments such as the European Social Fund Plus+ to support abortion-related measures would still entail the deployment of EU funds in this area.
Such funding mechanisms would clearly undermine national laws in areas where the EU has no authority. EU powers simply cannot be expanded through institutional activism.
The inconsistency becomes clear when viewed alongside the 2014 “One of Us” European Citizens’ Initiative, which gathered nearly 1.9 million signatures. This was one of the most supported initiatives in EU history and called on the Commission to ensure that EU funds would not be used to finance activities involving the destruction of human embryos. Despite this historic popular backing, the Commission declined to propose legislation.
The contrast is striking. When millions of Europeans mobilized to defend unborn life, their request was dismissed. Now, an initiative seeking to expand abortion access receives political endorsement. Such divergence invites the legitimate question of whether the Commission is engaging in principled legal assessment or cherry-picking initiatives that align with a preferred ideological direction.
Every human life has inherent dignity and must receive legal protection, before and after birth. The right to life, as clearly enshrined in both EU and international law, must logically apply to the unborn without exception. The EU was founded on the solemn promise to uphold human dignity and the right to life as its non-negotiable core. It is undisputed that abortion itself is not an EU competence. Yet this very limitation does not create a vacuum of responsibility. The binding Charter of Fundamental Rights opens with the crystal-clear declaration that “human dignity is inviolable” and that “everyone has the right to life.” These are not aspirational slogans, but rather the constitutional DNA of the entire European project. To claim that the EU may remain neutral while unborn Europeans are legally terminated by the hundreds of thousands every year is not neutrality; it is a profound betrayal of the Union’s founding purpose.
Thus, it is not only that the EU must reject any and all efforts to mainstream abortion access across its members but, in fact, that it has a core responsibility to do the opposite and protect unborn life in every state. Beyond lacking competence to impose a uniform abortion regime, the EU possesses a definite positive obligation to protect life wherever its existing powers touch the issue.
Far from supporting the evils of activist abortion initiatives, Brussels can and must enact targeted measures to defend the right to life, starting with ring-fencing EU funds from abortion providers, guaranteeing conscientious objection, and supporting maternity and pregnancy services that uphold the dignity of every person. Anything less destroys the very essence of the European project.
The Commission’s endorsement of this new abortion agenda may be framed as symbolic, but symbolism shapes policy. Member states may now feel emboldened to rely on existing EU instruments, like the European Social Fund, to finance abortion-related measures.
The European project cannot endure if its foundational principles, most notably the protection of human dignity and all human rights, are treated as optional.
