“A necessity and an emergency.
» President Emmanuel Macron welcomed this Friday the inclusion of abortion in the French Constitution, celebrated with a solemn sealing ceremony at Place Vendôme, on the occasion of International Women's Rights Day.
“The seal of the Republic seals on this day a long fight for freedom, a fight made of tears, of drama, of broken destinies,” he insisted, four days after this historic vote.
The president thus paid tribute to "generations of women deprived of the most intimate of their choices: that of having or not a child", "with faces of suffering", forced to resort to dangerous "clandestine operations" in order to be able to still have an abortion and are confronted with “suspicions” and “sermons”.
The Head of State also saluted the memory of several personalities who broke the taboos around abortion and moved the fight forward, such as the writers Simone De Beauvoir and Annie Ernaux.
“Engrave the irreversible”
Faced with “the setbacks of our time”, it is more necessary than ever to protect this right, he stressed.
“All over the world, including in the largest democracies, we are witnessing the decline of the right to abortion,” he continued, referring without naming them to the United States, where the right to abortion has been dynamited by the Supreme Court in 2022. “Since the unthinkable happens, we had to engrave the irreversible,” he insisted.
A strong gesture that the Head of State now wishes to take to the European level: he confirmed his desire to include the “freedom to resort” to abortion “in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union”, where according to him “nothing can be taken for granted and everything must be defended”.
“Beyond Europe, we will fight for this right to become universal and effective,” said Emmanuel Macron, believing that “progress in women’s rights is progress in human rights.”
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In his speech, the leader also congratulated all the political figures who worked to bring about the vote, citing in particular the president of the LFI group in the National Assembly Mathilde Panot and the environmentalist senator Mélanie Vogel, who have been engaged in this fight for several months already.
Prime Minister Gabriel Attal was criticized for not having mentioned their names during his speech to Congress.
A few minutes earlier, the Minister of Justice Éric Dupond-Moretti had put the seal of the Republic on the law including the “guaranteed freedom” of access to voluntary termination of pregnancy in the Constitution.
Éric Dupond-Moretti puts the seal of the Republic on the law including abortion in the Constitution pic.twitter.com/a4vK0gJCwx
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He handled the 1810 press, expressly taken out of his office, in great silence, before long applause from the guests and several hundred people who came to attend this ceremony of sealing the Constitution.
Singer Catherine Ringer then sang a vibrant “Marseillaise”, closing the ceremony, revisited to celebrate a “pure law in the Constitution”.