Is it a crime to oppose abortion in France?
By Richard Ings, TCW:
A SPECIAL ‘Congress’ at the Versailles Palace yesterday brought together members of the French parliament’s lower and upper houses to approve an amendment to the French constitution recognising the ‘guaranteed freedom for women to resort to an abortion’ (though in typical French fashion the word ‘abortion’ has been medicalised to ‘voluntary pregnancy termination’). Most of the political class, including but not limited to – heavens, no – left-wingers and feminists, had already broken out the champagne after the ‘conservative’ Senate voted overwhelmingly in favour of the amendment last Wednesday. The joint session of the Senate and the National Assembly was in essence a formality as well as a further opportunity for the government to bang on about how much it supports women’s rights against the ‘forces of reaction’.
You might be forgiven for asking ‘which forces of reaction?’ If we accept at face value the argument that those who oppose abortion are living in the last century (and not even in its last half), only 50 of them were apparently present in the Senate on Wednesday – out of 339 – and many simply couldn’t speak the words ‘not against abortion’ quickly enough before disputing whether it should be elevated into a Republican principle worthy of a Constitutional amendment. That said, some, speaking anonymously to sympathetic journalists, did confess they were voting with the tide precisely in case they were seen as being ‘behind the times’ or, indeed, ‘conservative’ a word which carries much more opprobrium in France than it does in the UK or USA.
In reality, this is President Emmanuel Macron’s real victory now it has been formally adopted: moving the Overton window ever further towards the freedom to end life, whether that be before it is born, or before its time, eager as he has been at times to make ‘dying in dignity’ (that is, euthanasia) permissible under French law. As any student of history will know, once a state has given power over life and death to individuals under the law, it is a short step to it assuming that responsibility itself, on behalf of its citizens, as it sees fit and proper.
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