The assessment of Emmanuel Macron’s five-year term regarding the progress of the culture of death is largely positive: after the extension of medically assisted procreation to single women and female couples, the conservation of oocytes for research purposes, the authorization of human-animal chimeric embryos, and now the widely adopted extension of the abortion deadline.
It was necessary to move quickly to adopt the text “strengthening the right to abortion.” It was passed it in force, some will say, because the parliamentary session – presidential election obliges – must end on February 28.
“The UK goes up to 24 weeks, Sweden up to 18, Spain 14 weeks. So in France, we are not really ahead,” fulminates Albane Gaillot, LREM MP who has been carrying out the project for several months.
Unsurprisingly, the text was adopted by the deputies, under the wire, after a parliamentary back and forth of three readings, and a systematic rejection of the text by the Senate. The new law adopted by the presidential majority now provides:
– the extension of the time for access to abortion from twelve to fourteen weeks of pregnancy;
– the authorization given to midwives to perform instrumental abortions;
– the creation of a directory of professionals and structures practicing abortion.
The Alliance Vita association denounces a “law passed by force.” “It is unworthy that abortion becomes an adjustment variable for the government at the very end of its mandate.
“The President of the Republic had himself spoken out on several occasions against the extension of the deadlines, saying that he was measuring “the trauma of having an abortion” before the government resumed by surprise, without an impact study, this law on his behalf last December,” denounces the association in a press release.
Is the reinforcement of an alleged right to abortion a priority for what the deputies are supposed to represent? Not really, if we look at an IFOP poll carried out in October 2020, according to which 92% of French people believe that “abortion leaves psychological scars that are difficult for women to live with,” and nearly three quarters (73%) of between them also judge that “society should do more to help women avoid having recourse to abortion.”
Some see the green light given to the project by the French Head of State as an appeal to the left and to progressives more generally, a few weeks before a ballot which may hold surprises: a analysis tempered by Frédéric Dani, director general of Ifop, who doubts that the extension of the abortion period or the PMA is a “distinctive enough marker” to rally the left wing of his electorate behind Macron.
Be that as it may, no declared candidate for the presidential election wished to reconsider the right to abortion… For information, in 2020, 222,000 abortions were recorded in France, including 16% during the last two weeks of a legal period now extended by two weeks.
The bill extending the time limit for abortion was definitively adopted on February 23, 2022. The five-year term of the French head of state thus ends with a final transgression against the right to life.