“They will no longer decide for us.” This slogan adorns a 1971 poster of the French movement that demanded abortion rights, the Mouvement pour la Liberté de l’Avortement (MLA). It shows a pregnant woman lying on her back while being held down by a male doctor, a priest, a businessman and a male judge. A year later the campaigner and lawyer Gisèle Halimi told a court at Bobigny in the north-east suburbs of Paris: “Four women are appearing before four men ... And to talk about what? Scans, the uterus, wombs, pregnancies and abortions!”
It was precisely so that women would no longer have to defend (in front of men) the control of their own bodies that feminists sought to enshrine the right to abortion in law in France. Ever since achieving this right - in 1975 - they have worried about losing it. They know how tough such struggles are and how fragile that hard-won rights can be. For women, history consists of swings between victories and cruel defeats.
A brutal reminder of this in relation to abortion rights has come from the United States where in June 2022 the Supreme Court overturned the verdict of Roe v Wade, a judgement which had guaranteed the right to abortion since 1973. In Europe, Poland and Hungary have taken the same route.
On Monday France took a radically different path. Members of the National Assembly and the Senate, meeting together in a special Congress, decided to insert a phrase into Article 34 of the French Constitution. It reads: “The law determines the conditions in which a woman's guaranteed right to have recourse to an abortion is exercised.”
Enlargement : Illustration 1
This is an historic vote. France has become the first country in the world to mention abortion in its constitution. What makes it even more striking is that it was an overwhelming vote by Members of Parliament and Senators: 780 votes for the change to the country's Constitution and just 72 against.
This vote was the result of a consensus that had been patiently built in Parliament, first of all at the initiative of the Left (Mathilde Panot from the radical-left La France Insoumise) and the Greens (Mélanie Vogel), then with the support of women from the governing majority (Aurore Bergé from the Renaissance party), then Emmanuel Macron, before finally convincing the rightwing Les Républicains (LR).
This last-named party was pushed into its decision by the powerful support for the proposition felt across the country. For instance, the LR senator Thierry Meignen representing the Seine-Saint-Denis département adjoining Paris, intially voted against the idea, before approving the final version. In between, he explained, he had been “questioned by my partner and also my nephews, nieces, granddaughters...” Addressing the Congress, prime minister Gbariel Attal also spoke of himself as a “son, a brother and a friend”.
The pomp of the Versailles ceremonies should not be allowed to obscure this vote by the Congress: it is both the culmination of exemplary Parliamentary work and of a deep desire on the part of society. This is something sufficiently rare to be worth applauding.
A 'Copernican revolution'
Its impact should not be minimised either: the fight for abortion rights and contraception is a relatively recent one. With the exception of figures such as Madeleine Pelletier, who was forcibly detained in 1939 for having supported and carried out abortion, this struggle dates from the second wave of feminism that began in the 1970s.
“While not neglecting inequalities, especially in the world of work, the activists set new categories of freedom, that only the most radical, and in particular the neo-Malthusians, had dared to tackle before. Being free now required being in charge of one's own body, of its ability to reproduce and of the sexual pleasure that it provides,” recalls a recently-published book 'Les Féminismes. Une histoire mondiale, 19e-20e siècles', edited by Yannick Ripa and Françoise Thébaud, and published by Textuel.
This battle, which became enshrined by the law legalising abortion in 1975, known as the 'loi Veil', was not like other struggles: in the context of the history of humanity and in anthropological terms it represented a break with the past, as described by the anthropologist Françoise Héritier, and was a “Copernican revolution”, to use historian Geneviève Fraisse's expression. What we have seen in recent years, with the powerful #MeToo movement, is a continuation of this. It continues to shake up relations between women and men, the very idea we have of ourselves, and the notion of sex and gender.
Let us also note in passing that winning the right to abortion is a victory for secularism, as the academic Jean Baubérot has often written – a secularism that frees itself from religions to enact common laws, far removed from the restrictive vision of those who discuss it only in order to attack Muslims in our country.
Official law and law in practice
Once that has all been stated, let us remember that the vote on Monday March 4th does not guarantee women actual access to abortion. Access to it remains unequal across the country, and sometimes very difficult.
The partial collapse of the health system, the closure of abortion clinics, the conscience clause for doctors who refuse to perform terminations, the increasingly precarious situation of a section of the population and the weakened status of migrants and trans people: all these are obstacles that make life tough for people wanting to have an abortion. This is true in certain regions more than others, and in certain neighbourhoods more than others.
Neither the president of the National Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet (who rightly pointed out that she was the first woman in history to preside over a Congress at Versailles, having first walked through the palace's 'galerie des bustes' full of busts “exclusively of men”), nor the prime minister Gabriel Attal has made the slighted commitment on this issue of access to abortion.
In day-to-day life, those who have campaigned for the right to abortion also come under attack, often from the far right. That is the case with the association Planning Familial, whose centres are regularly targeted. This very Monday graffiti declaring 'Planning assassin' ('Planning is a murderer') was reported, Bénédicte Paoli, a member of the group's national executive, told France TV-Info. She spoke about “anti-choice [protestors] who are more and more visible and unrestrained”.
In recent years the government has often been silent on this subject, while some ministers have – off the record – attacked Planning Familial's stances on the wearing of the veil or on transgender identity.
Exploiting women's rights
Most of all, there has been unacceptable political exploitation of the issue on the part of the government. The cause deserves better than petty tactical calculations by Emmanuel Macron. He did not really want abortion to be enshrined in the Constitution; he ended up backing it when he realised it could help support his illusion of even-handedness with different sections of the political spectrum following his controversial law on immigration and bitterly-opposed pension reform.
Last year the president also opportunistically organised a last-minute homage to Gisèle Halimi, which was boycotted by a number of feminist organisations. And as for the official ceremony for the formal rubber-stamping of Monday's historic vote, that will take place this Friday March 8th - International Women's Day.
To think that one can enshrine the right to abortion in the Constitution and at the same time criticise the “court” of public opinion and a “society of inquisition” in relation to the #MeToo movement, as the president has done, makes no sense. Nor does it make sense to describe actor Gérard Depardieu as someone who “makes France proud” or to defend ministers facing accusations of sexual violence after having had “man to man” discussions with them.
Since the 1970s the battle for the right to abortion has been greeted by criticism, sometimes ferocious, from the patriarchy. Since #MeToo it is even more obvious that control over one's body for women or LGBTQI+ people cannot be compromised on.
The historic vote by Monday's Congress cannot disguise the masculinity that emanates from the Élysée. Fortunately, while presidents come and go, the Constitution remains.
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- The original French version of this op-ed article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter