France’s President Emmanuel Macron will on Friday, March 8, 2024, oversee abortion becoming a constitutional right at a special ceremony in Paris to mark the world’s first.
The procedure had been legal in France since 1975, but Macron last year pledged to better protect it after the US Supreme Court in 2022 overturned the half-century-old right to the procedure, allowing individual states to ban or curtail it.
In a historic vote, a rare congress of both houses of parliament on Monday gave a green light towards making terminating a pregnancy a “guaranteed freedom” in the basic text, sparking celebration among feminists.
The ceremony comes on International Women’s Day, a year to the day the president promised to constitutionalise the right.
The move is backed by most of the French public, even if some conservatives remain against it.
The French government has said that it is now going to try to ensure better safeguards under EU law.
“France must now take this fight to the European level,” said its spokeswoman Prisca Thevenot on Wednesday.
“In 2022, the president said he wanted to add the right to abortion in the European Union’s charter of fundamental rights,” she added.
No country until now had so far as clearly safeguarded the right to a pregnancy termination in its basic text, according to Leah Hoctor, of the Center for Reproductive Rights.
Some countries allude to the right, while others explicitly mention abortion, but only in certain circumstances.
