France holding historic vote on abortion rights

French lawmakers will vote Monday whether to enshrine a right to abortion in the country's constitution. It would be the first country to do so.

French lawmakers meet on Monday for a final vote to include the right to abortion into the constitution, a world-first welcomed by women’s rights groups and criticized by anti-abortion groups.

Abortion rights are more widely accepted in France than in the United States and many other countries, with polls showing around 80 per cent of French people back the fact that abortion is legal.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to reverse the Roe v. Wade ruling that recognized women’s constitutional right to abortion prompted activists to push France to become the first country to clearly protect the right in its basic law.

“This right (to abortion) has retreated in the United States. And so nothing authorized us to think that France was exempt from this risk,” said Laura Slimani, from the Fondation des Femmes rights group.

The move, which has broad political support, is widely expected to get the three-fifths majority it needs in a special vote of the two houses of parliament on Monday afternoon.

“There’s a lot of emotion, as a feminist activist, also as a woman. And there’s a lot solemnity in a certain way, since we’re going to live through a historic moment, I hope,” Slimani said.

Women have had a legal right to abortion in France since a 1974 law, which many harshly criticized at the time.

Monday’s vote is expected to inscribe in Article 34 of the French constitution that “the law determines the conditions in which a woman has the guaranteed freedom to have recourse to an abortion.”