The Senate, with a majority on the right, voted Wednesday in favor of the inclusion in the Constitution of the “freedom of women” to resort to abortion, a formulation which abandons the notion of “right” dear to the left, but allows the parliamentary shuttle to continue. And government spokesman Olivier Véran hailed this Friday a “very substantial advance”, however regretting that the upper house does not speak of the “right” to abortion like the deputies.
“It is a step forward which is very substantial to already have a text coming out of the Senate”, noted on franceinfo the Minister Delegate for Democratic Renewal. “It was not won that the Senate, in which we do not have the majority, decides for a text”.
“I preferred the formulation of the National Assembly”
“There remains an important step, it is called the joint joint commission”, he recalled, since deputies and senators, who voted for two different versions of the proposal, must now agree on a common wording, before it can possibly be put to a referendum. “I preferred the formulation of the National Assembly”, underlined Olivier Véran.
“We consider that if tomorrow the extreme right, for example, were to take power in our country, the law is not sufficiently protective for women and therefore we want to anchor it at the constitutional level so that it is impossible by law to cut corners,” he argued.
A proposed LFI constitutional law was approved in November, at first reading, by the National Assembly. But the text has been completely rewritten by the Senate, which proposes to supplement article 34 of the Constitution with the following formula: “The law determines the conditions under which the freedom of the woman to terminate her pregnancy is exercised”. .