“The battle continues.”
The day after the historic vote of Parliament in Congress in Versailles to include abortion in the Constitution, the coordinator of France Insoumise Manuel Bompard hailed a
“great victory”
led by feminist activists and associations.
“This right
must now be effective,”
however, argued the MP for Bouches-du-Rhône on the France 2 set, on March 5, so that women can access abortion without any hindrance.
According to him, this guarantee requires
“the removal of the
conscience clause”
of health professionals, which would penalize women in accessing abortion.
“Today, you have one in four women who are forced to change departments when they want to have an abortion because there are not enough practitioners,”
he further argued to support his remarks, thus implying a direct link between the lack of doctors available to perform an abortion and the existence of this conscience clause.
In reality, this figure, which is overestimated, is based on very diverse reasons.
Double conscience clause
The Public Health Code effectively establishes the principle according to which any doctor can refuse to treat a patient without giving reasons.
“Except in cases of emergency and those where he fails in his duties of humanity, a doctor has the right to refuse care for professional or personal reasons.
If he withdraws from his mission, he must then notify the patient and transmit to the doctor designated by the latter the information useful for the continuation of care,”
states article R4127-47 of the text.
At the same time, the Veil law of January 17, 1975, which legalized the voluntary termination of pregnancy, added a second conscience clause, specific to the act of abortion, and this time concerning all medical personnel.
The text thus provides that
“a doctor is never required to carry out a voluntary termination of pregnancy but he must inform, without delay, the interested party of his refusal and immediately communicate to her the names of the practitioners likely to carry out this intervention (. ..).
No midwife, nurse or medical assistant of any kind is required to assist in the termination of a pregnancy.
»
It is this second conscience clause which is in the sights of the Insoumis, as MP Mathilde Panot clarified a few hours after Manuel Bompard's intervention.
Disparity in access to abortion according to departments
In reality, 17% of women - and not 25% - have an abortion outside their department of residence, specifies a Drees study published in September 2023. The rate has been constant for several years.
The report highlights strong variations between departments.
Thus, 52% of women residing in Ardèche and having had an abortion did so in their department, compared to 96% in Bas-Rhin.
And in fact, when 18.1 women out of 1000 resort to abortion in Île-de-France, this rate drops to 11.6 in Pays-de-la-Loire.
But where exactly do these disparities come from?
In its pages, the Drees study mentions various reasons.
Firstly, the unequal distribution of care centers allowing abortion.
A 2020 parliamentary report highlighted this imbalance between departments.
“At the slightest grain of sand, sick leave, retirement or savings to make, access to abortion becomes complicated
,” the report pointed out.
Family Planning also states that 130 abortion centers have closed over the past 15 years due to lack of resources.
At the same time, the number of maternity hospitals increased from 1,369 in 1975 to 458 in 2020. In fact, certain departments therefore suffer from a lack of medical staff and infrastructure.
Thus, the difficulty of access to abortion in these white areas is therefore justified by the shortage of resources.
The study does not in any case mention the conscience clause as a reason for the inequality of access to abortion depending on the department, especially since it is difficult to measure the rate of doctors refusing to perform this procedure. .
Contacted by
Le Figaro,
the Ministry of Health did not respond to our requests.
Carrying out an abortion outside the department can also respond to
“women’s choice of confidentiality or greater geographical proximity”,
further points out the 2023 Drees study
.
The woman may prefer to keep the procedure she underwent secret, favoring an abortion center further from her home.
The latter's place of residence may also be closer to the healthcare system of the neighboring department than to their own.
In summary
, 17% of women (and not 25% as put forward by Manuel Bompard) carry out an abortion outside their department of residence.
The reasons, which are plural, are based on unequal access to infrastructure, lack of means, allowing an abortion to be carried out, but also on a desire of the women concerned to guarantee the confidentiality of this operation.
At this point, studies do not point to the conscience clause as specifically linked to these disparities.