For the second time during Macron’s term, the issue of extending the legal deadline for surgical abortion is being debated by French parliamentarians. After a first attempt that failed in 2020, the text was studied and adopted in the first reading in the National Assembly in November 2021. Now, the senators are studying it again. The right-wing majority of the upper house rejected the text as soon as it passed through the special committee, and rejected it once more when it went to the plenary session on Wednesday, January 19th. In essence, the proposal underwent a clearly laid out procedure that leads to the automatic rejection of the text, with no requirement for a detailed examination of the articles that make it up.
President of the Senate Gérard Larcher, of the party Les Républicains, explained to the press on the news channel LCI that one could be in favor of the right to abortion and yet hostile to this new law, which, according to him, is no longer in the spirit of the Veil law. The Veil law authorized abortion in France in 1975. He recalled that the law of 17 January 1975, justifying the decriminalization of abortion, had the objective “to respond to the problems of women and to accompany them.”
During the debates, the president of the Senate, who was also formerly president of the French Hospital Federation, reminded the forum of the different modifications imposed on the Veil law since its origins: namely, the extension for abortion from 10 to 12 weeks and a shortening of the compulsory reflection period. With many senators, he refused to consider further modifications and recalled that abortion remains a “difficult moment.” Gérard Larcher had unexpected words for a politician of his rank in the French political class, and spoke in favor of a better accompaniment of women exposed to the terrible dilemma of putting an end to their pregnancies:
Giving a delay that goes beyond 10 weeks to receive a woman and perform the abortion is not satisfactory. I would like to remind you that it seems to me that we need to review the way we welcome these young women, and how we accompany them. It is not a banal act, it is an act that affects them personally. It’s a form of respect for women.
Instead of arguing for the rights of the unborn child, which is the argument most often invoked by pro-life proponents, he argued on the fragility of the woman and the risks to her well-being, which is jeopardized in later-stage abortions. His response was a rebuttal to the argument put forward by Albane Gaillot, the deputy behind the bill, who defends the proposal as violating the rights of women.
However, blocking the bill in the Senate should not prevent its adoption at the second reading in the National Assembly. The French system provides for the lower house to have the final say in the event of disagreement between the two chambers, which means that the new law extending abortion up to 14 weeks should come into force before the end of the term in February 2022.
