ANDERS WIKLUND / AFP
The winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature, French writer Annie Ernaux, during a press conference in Stockholm, Sweden, December 6, 2022.
IVG – A mistake that speaks volumes. Senators voted Wednesday for the inclusion in the Constitution of “ freedom guaranteed » for women to have recourse to abortion, even if the bill proposed by left-wing deputies advocated the inclusion of “ right ” to abortion. Two very different notions which created a little confusion for Annie Ernaux, writer and Nobel Prize winner for literature, this Thursday, February 29 in the evening, during a launch party for a feminist quarterly review.
“In 1964, I was looking everywhere for someone willing to put a probe in my stomach to have an abortion”begins the author of the novel Years, as you can hear in the video below, published by Alice Coffin, journalist and feminist activist.
“In the Constitution, abortion is a right… uh no it’s not a right…” then Annie Ernaux corrects: “it’s a guaranteed freedom.” This slip of the tongue made the assembly laugh in front of her, so the writer, accomplice with her audience, concludes: “MOh, too, I would have preferred it to be the law.”
Two different concepts
In the initial constitutional law proposal, carried by LFI, the text wanted to guarantee “the effectiveness and equal access to the right to abortion”, but the Senate had adopted a modified version evoking the “ freedom of the woman to terminate her pregnancy. The government then decided by finding a compromise by proposing the notion of “freedom guaranteed”.
“Freedom is a ‘capacity to do’, while the right is almost an obligation incumbent on the interlocutor”explicit Anne-Charlène Bezzina, lecturer in public law and constitutionalist, at Europe 1.
Concretely, the formulation adopted “ means that no law can explicitly say that the woman does not have the freedom to resort to abortion”adds Laureline Fontaine, professor of constitutional law at the Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3, to France Blue. But “the text says nothing about the conditions in which this freedom is exercised. It’s up to the law to say so”she points out.
Feminist associations, which advocated for the inclusion of ” right “ to abortion in the Constitution, ruling that abortion is a “ fundamental right “, were still happy with this compromise. As you can see in our video below, environmentalist senator Mélanie Vogel and feminist activists shed tears of joy in the Senate just after the vote.
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