She does not give up. Aware that the cross-partisan bill to include the right to abortion in the Constitution may not pass the Senate on Wednesday, PS Senator Laurence Rossignol calls on the government to present a text itself. “It’s good to support our bill (…) but the government, like us, we know that the procedure of parliamentary initiative will not go to the end”, she declared during a conference of hurry.
“It is too complicated, too demanding”, she underlined, affirming that “only the government in reality can take the initiative of a constitutional reform”. The 22 constitutional revisions carried out since 1958 according to the procedure of article 89 of the Constitution have in fact all originated from a draft law.
Two similar proposals in the pipes
The bill to include the right to abortion and contraception in the Constitution will be debated at first reading on Wednesday in the Senate chamber, as part of a “parliamentary niche” reserved for the environmental group. It was co-signed by elected officials from seven of the eight political groups in the Senate, with the exception of the first of them, Les Républicains, underlined its author Mélanie Vogel (ecologist). “It’s just about protecting what we have,” she said.
“In the world, no fundamental law protects the right of women to have an abortion,” noted Xavier Iacovelli, vice-president of the Renaissance-majority RDPI group. By constitutionalizing the right to abortion, our country would be at the forefront. Two similar constitutional bills are in the pipeline in the National Assembly, on the initiative of the left-wing alliance Nupes and the presidential majority group Renaissance.