Enough to call into question this hoped-for progress. On the pretext that, according to him, “abortion is not threatened in France”Gérard Larcher, the president of the Senate, opposed the inclusion of abortion in the French Constitution, this Tuesday, January 23 on Franceinfo. “If it were threatened, believe me, I would fight for it to be maintained,” assured the right-wing elected official, but he thinks that “the Constitution is not a catalog of social and societal rights”.
The inclusion of abortion in the Constitution, promised by Emmanuel Macron, must be debated in the National Assembly this Wednesday, before being examined in the Senate where the right-wing majority has never hidden its skepticism, with a view to possible adoption by Congress in early March.
“By tradition, I do not vote, but I am giving you a very personal opinion. In conscience, I think that the Constitution is not that catalog”repeated the leader of the senatorial right. “The first concern of mine is the conditions in which we practice voluntary termination of pregnancy”Larcher further pleaded, recalling “that we have closed 130 centers in more than ten years” who were dedicated to abortion.
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 under which the freedom guaranteed to women to have recourse is exercised” to abortion.
He is trying to find a middle path between the Assembly, which had voted at the end of 2022 an LFI text to guarantee the“access to the right to abortion”, and the right-wing Senate, which in February approved a version evoking the “freedom of a woman to terminate her pregnancy”. He therefore adds the notion of freedom “guarantee”.
Semantic debate
If the deputies of the law committee adopted the government’s constitutional reform project on Wednesday, before a probable adoption in the hemicycle of the National Assembly on January 24, the wording could raise more questions in the Senate, essential for retouching the law fundamental.
Will right-wing senators ignore the precision of “guaranteed freedom” ? “It’s a way of reintroducing the idea of law in another form,” said senator LR Philippe Bas in mid-December. “I don’t see why this wording would constitute an argument for changing one’s vote,” compared to the version adopted in the Senate last year, estimates environmentalist senator Mélanie Vogel.
If the upper house were to adopt the reform in the same terms, a Congress bringing together parliamentarians in Versailles would be convened on March 5. Final adoption would require 3/5ths of the votes. Otherwise, the calendar would be disrupted, and the text would resume the parliamentary shuttle.