France enshrines abortion as constitutional right in world first

The French parliament on Monday voted to anchor the right to abortion in the country's constitution, making France the first country in the world to offer explicit protection for terminating a pregnancy in its basic law.

A congress of both houses of parliament, gathered in a special chamber at the Palace of Versailles, easily found the three-fifths super-majority needed for the change, with 780 in favour and 72 lawmakers voting against.

Deputies applauded the change with a standing ovation.

President Emmanuel Macron described the move as "French pride" that had sent a "universal message", with a special public ceremony planned to celebrate the move on International Women's Day on March 8.

The Eiffel Tower was lit up in celebration after the change was passed with the slogan "My Body My Choice".

"This is a fundamental step... A step that will go down in history," Prime Minister Gabriel Attal told the lawmakers as he urged them to pass the legislation.

He said they owed "a moral debt" toward all women who suffered before the legalisation of abortion.

But he said the freedom to abort remained "in danger" worldwide, with our "freedoms in essence threatened... at the mercy of decision makers."

"In one generation, one year, one week, you can go from one thing to the opposite," he said, referring to rights reversals in the United States, Hungary and Poland.

Such joint parliamentary sessions are extremely rare in France and called only for momentous occasions such as constitutional changes, the last of which was made in 2008.

Celebrations and protests

Macron pledged last year to enshrine abortion -- legal in France since 1975 -- in the constitution after the US Supreme Court in 2022 overturned the half-century-old right to the procedure, allowing individual American states to ban or curtail it.

In January, France's lower house of parliament, the National Assembly, overwhelmingly approved making abortion a "guaranteed freedom" in the constitution.

The upper house, the Senate, followed suit on Wednesday.

A majority of the French public support the move to give the right to abortion extra protection, according to polls.

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 have said in private they felt under pressure to give it a green light.

The influential speaker of the Senate, Gerard Larcher, made clear that while he backed the right to abortion he was not in favour of inscribing it into the constitution, saying the right was not under threat in France.

Several hundred abortion opponents, largely marginalised in the move for constitutional change, protested in Versailles.

Catholic bishops called for a day of "fasting and prayer" so the French could "rediscover the taste for life".

Weighing in from Rome, the Vatican said there could be "no 'right' to take a human life".

But hundreds of jubilant backers of the move also took to the Place du Trocadero in central Paris on Monday to witness the passing of the law on large video screen deployed for the event.

'Never have imagined'

Abortion was legalised in France in 1975 in a law championed by health minister Simone Veil, a women's rights icon granted the rare honour of burial at the Pantheon after her death in 2018. Her son was present at the session.

When political campaigning began in earnest in 1971, "we could never have imagined 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 reporters.

At the time, an estimated 700,000 to 800,000 women aborted each year.

Leah Hoctor, of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said France could offer "the first explicit broad constitutional provision of its kind, not just in Europe, but also globally."

Agence France-Presse