While Emmanuel Macron’s proposals on boosting the birth rate in France are not unanimous, opponents of abortion, largely represented by conservative Catholics, took advantage of their traditional “march for life” on Sunday in Paris to denounce its inclusion in the Constitution but also the future law on the end of life, two promises from the executive.
This national event is organized each year on the occasion of the anniversary of the Veil law relating to voluntary termination of pregnancy (IVG) and promulgated on January 17, 1975.
At the start of the procession at 2:30 p.m. in front of Saint-Sulpice, several activists from the feminist movement Femen invited themselves topless before the procession set off, telling the crowd via megaphone “your opinion does not count, abortion is a right “. They were exfiltrated.
Next to signs claiming “healing is not killing” or “IVG = broken hearts”, the demonstrators chanted slogans like “Macron, Macron don’t touch embryos”. This year, the organizers highlighted the opposition to the inclusion of abortion in the Constitution, promised by Emmanuel Macron and which must be debated in the National Assembly on January 24.
Against a backdrop of concern over the challenges to abortion around the world, and particularly in the United States, the government’s text plans to include in the Constitution the fact that “the law determines the conditions in which exercise the freedom guaranteed to the woman to have recourse to abortion. The wording “does not suit us, we wanted to include a right in the Constitution, but we need this political signal,” declared the leader of the LFI deputies Mathilde Panot, Sunday on France 3. “This project seems everything to us. completely indecent, useless and dangerous,” declared to AFP the president of the March for Life, Nicolas Tardy-Joubert, who calls for “prevention policies” to be put in place instead. According to the latest official figures, 234,300 abortions were recorded in France in 2022.
The organizers of the march are also calling for a compulsory ultrasound from the sixth week of pregnancy, making it possible to “hear the fetal heart beat”, or even a three-day reflection period before any abortion. They also call for “encouraging childbirth under X” and defending “the absolute right to conscientious objection of health personnel and protecting the specific conscience clause. »
A movement opposed to the right to euthanasia
Another subject on the agenda of the demonstration, the rejection of any “legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia” a few weeks before the presentation of a bill on the end of life, announced for February in council ministers.
Tricolor flag in hand, Beatrix Flach, 60, declares demonstrating “to defend freedom of expression on abortion and the freedom of conscience of caregivers, threatened by the constitutionalization of abortion” and to defend “those who cannot not speak and are sick” at the end of life.
Géraud de Laveaucoupet, 22, judges for his part that many caregivers “are bothered by potential euthanasia because they consider that it is not their job”. What is being prepared “worries me, as does the constitutionalization of abortion,” he added.