IVG has just taken a new step towards its inclusion in the Constitution. The National Assembly largely approved on the night of Wednesday to Thursday the notion of “guaranteed freedom” for women to access it, a vote which will have to be confirmed on Tuesday in order to send the ball to the Senate.
After often bitter debates between the majority and the left on one side, and LR elected officials on the other, 99 deputies voted for the single article of the constitutional revision project. The presidential camp, and the left-wing and Liot deputies present brought their votes, like two LR deputies and two RN. Thirteen deputies voted against (4 LR, 8 RN and one non-registered).
Mathilde Panot achieves a “historic victory”
“The law determines the conditions in which the freedom guaranteed to a woman to have recourse” to an abortion is exercised: through this formulation the executive hopes to find a way between the Assembly, which had voted at the end of 2022 an LFI text for enshrine a “right” to abortion, and the Senate, which narrowly validated a few months later the inclusion of a “freedom” in the Constitution. Because the path chosen for a constitutional revision requires that both chambers adopt the same text, before it is submitted to a vote in Congress bringing together parliamentarians, and requiring 3/5th of the votes.
“Abortion is not a freedom like any other, because it allows women to decide their future,” said Minister of Justice Éric Dupond-Moretti at the opening of the debates. Despite regrets on the left over the abandonment of the term “right” or the absence of reference to contraception, Mathilde Panot (LFI) called for a “historic victory” over the “anti-rights (who) sit […] to the extreme right. “There is no question of our political family calling into question access to abortion,” retorted Pascale Bordes (RN), criticizing an “inappropriate and useless” reform.
The game looks more difficult in the Senate
The debates turned sour in the evening, in particular during the examination of LR amendments to return the legal period for abortion to 12 weeks (compared to 14 currently). Reproaching the majority for not committing against a hypothetical significant extension of the legal duration, Thierry Breton (LR) accused it of behaving as a “trailer of family planning”, causing a reaction on the left and among the Macronists. The revision will not create “absolute and unlimited right”, insisted Éric Dupond-Moretti.
For a Congress to be convened, the Senate would have to approve on February 28 this notion of “guaranteed freedom”, which is raising eyebrows among executives on the right. And the senatorial right, reluctant to give gifts to the executive, had experienced as pressure the fact that the government suggested in December the date of March 5 to convene the Congress, which would suppose that the Senate approved the government’s drafting .