French lawmakers are set to vote Monday on a historic change to the country’s constitution, which would enshrine the right to abortion, a move that has received massive public backing.
A joint session of both houses of parliament in Versailles starting at 3:30 pm (1430 GMT) is expected to find the three-fifths majority required for the amendment after it passed the Senate, which leans to the right.
If congress approves the amendment, France will be the only country in the world to clearly safeguard the right to end a pregnancy in its fundamental law.
President Emmanuel Macron promised last year to include abortion — legal in France since 1975 — in the constitution after the US Supreme Court in 2022 reversed the 50-year-old right to the procedure, allowing states to restrict or ban it.
France’s lower-house National Assembly in January overwhelmingly passed making abortion a “guaranteed freedom” in the constitution, followed by the Senate on Wednesday.
The bill is now likely to clear the last obstacle of a combined vote of both chambers when they meet for a rare joint session at the former royal palace of the Palace of Versailles.
Few doubt that the needed supermajority will be found after the three-fifths mark was easily surpassed in both previous votes.
When political campaigning started in earnest in 1971, “we could never have dreamed that the right to abortion would one day be written into the constitution,” Claudine Monteil, head of the Femmes Monde (Women in the World) association, told AFP.
Monteil was the youngest signatory to “Manifesto of the 343”, a 1971 French petition signed by 343 women who confessed to having illegally terminated a pregnancy, along with up to 800,000 of their fellow citizens each year.
Abortion was legalised in France in 1975 in a law spearheaded by health minister Simone Veil, a women’s rights icon granted the rare honour of burial at the Pantheon after her death in 2018.
But another leading feminist, Simone de Beauvoir, had told Monteil the year before that “all it will take is a political, economic or religious crisis for women’s rights to be challenged”, she recalled.
In that sense, “the behaviour of the US Supreme Court did women all over the world a favour, because it woke us up”, Monteil said.
Most members of the French public support the move to give the right extra protection.
A November 2022 survey by French polling group IFOP found that 86 percent of French people supported inscribing it in the constitution.
Left-wing and centrist politicians have welcomed the change, while right-wing senators in private have said they felt under pressure to give it a green light.
One said her daughters would “no longer come for Christmas” if she opposed the move.
Macron on Wednesday celebrated what he called the Senate’s “decisive step” and immediately called for the parliamentary congress on Monday.
