On November 29, 1974, the National Assembly adopted the right to abortion

It was November 29, 1974. At 3:40 the French National Assembly voted in favor of decriminalizing abortion. With 284 votes in favor and 189 against, the deputies made access to voluntary termination of pregnancy (abortion) legal. A historic date for French women’s rights, which should be celebrated on every anniversary.

Thanks Simona

Three days before the vote of the deputies, on 26 November Simone Veil demonstrated her skills as a speaker and presented the bill authorizing abortion in a speech that also made history. The magistrate, then Minister of Health under the government of Valery Giscard d’Estaing, then declared: “We can no longer close our eyes to the 300,000 abortions that maim women in this country every year, flout our laws, and humiliate or traumatize those who resort to them.” Three days later, after about 25 hours of debate, the Veil law was adopted.

In France, the right to abortion is changing

If the Veil law, promulgated on January 17, 1975then authorizes abortion up to 10 weeks of pregnancy, the term was then postponed. Since February 2022, French women have been able to abort up to 14 weeks of pregnancy. Like a happy coincidence, almost on the same date, last November 24, the National Assembly took another step towards the right of women to dispose of their bodies. With an even more overwhelming majority of votes in favor of this bill (337 in favor and 32 against), the deputies approved inclusion of the right to abortion in the Constitution.

Worldwide, the downward trend

At a time when other countries are backtracking on abortion, France is one of those supporting this right.

In the United States, since the annulment of the Roe Vs Wade decree of June 24, more and more states have banned the right to abortion or drastically reduced the conditions of access.

In Poland, since 2020 and the ban on abortion in cases of serious malformation of the fetus, the rights of Polish women to dispose of their bodies are gradually being eroded. In still other countries, if the right to abortion exists, it is access to it that is missing.

Like in Turkey, where public hospitals refuse to practice it, or in Northern Ireland, where abortion after 10 weeks of pregnancy is impossible because there is no surgical abortion service in the country.

Among our Italian and English neighbors, it is the new governments in office, and the positions taken by their members in the past, that generate concern about what the right to abortion could become. Many examples which encourage us to celebrate the evolution of this law in our country, but which also remind us that it is never really acquired.