French President Emmanuel Macron announced on social media over the weekend that he is preparing to include the right to abortion in the French constitution.
He posted on X on Sunday that a constitutional bill will be sent to the Council of State in the next few days before being presented to the Council of Ministers by the end of the year. It would then be debated and voted on in parliament in the first half of 2024.
“In 2024, women’s freedom to have an abortion will be irreversible,” he posted.
Ratifying the text will require at least three-fifths of both the Congress and Senate to vote in favor of the change.
The movement to make abortion a constitutional right started in 2022 after the U.S. reversed the Supreme Court decision that reverted the regulation of abortion to state governments.
In 2022, two different texts, one written by the now Minister of Solidarity and Families, Aurore Bergé, and another by the leftist coalition NUPES, were unsuccessfully proposed as changes to the constitution.
Macron’s new proposal takes up the less extreme of the two previous positions in an attempt to form a consensus around the bill. Le Figaro reports that Macron’s bill would insert into the constitution that “ the law determines the conditions under which the freedom of women to have recourse to a voluntary termination of pregnancy is guaranteed.”
The leftist coalition of La France Insoumise has come out in support of Macron’s move.
“It is a victory for associations, collectives, and activists who fight to ensure that the right of women to dispose of their bodies is finally guaranteed,” Mathilde Panot, president of the party’s parliamentary group said.
Marine Le Pen, who supports legal abortion and ultimately voted in favor of last year’s proposal by the NUPES, has come out against the measure as “completely out of step with what the French are living through at the moment.”
“The president is obsessed with something totally useless,” she said on French television, adding that there is “no political movement requesting the questioning of abortion” in France.
But neither Le Pen’s party nor Macron’s are unanimous on the subject internally. It remains to be seen whether parties will impose discipline in voting or allow their deputies and senators to vote as they please, and if Macron has the needed supermajority to push abortion into the constitution.
