40 years ago, to the day, Simone Veil took to the rostrum of the National Assembly to defend her bill aimed at legalizing the right to abortion. It was necessary to fight, “to collect insults and violence with anti-Semitic overtones”, as the Parisian reminds us, but the voluntary termination of pregnancy has come out of hiding.
Forty years later, unfortunately there are still battles to be fought, because women still encounter obstacles. That is why MEPs should adopt a draft resolution today, a symbolic text, as Dominique Quinio points out in La Croix, which reaffirms the “fundamental right to termination of pregnancy”.
In 40 years, however, France has not stood still. Gradually, parliamentarians strengthened the right to abortion, notes Le Parisien: in 1982, it was the right to reimbursement, in 1993, an offense of obstructing abortion was created, and in 2001, the legal deadline is increased from ten to twelve weeks and independent doctors are authorized to perform medical abortions. Just recently, a law removed the “situation of distress” from the list of conditions for benefiting from this right.
Developments that are shocking compared to the number of abortions, which does not change: some 220,000 abortions per year. All the more surprising since France is one of the countries where women have the most recourse to contraception. “Our country seems to have failed to provide responsible sexual and emotional education, accessible to all, which prevents unwanted pregnancies”, says Flore Thomasset in La Croix. The roots of this failure are multiple. ” In France, only three methods are reimbursed while there are twelve”says Marie-Pierre Martinet, secretary general of Family Planning, in the daily.
But, is there an urgent need to lower this figure, which has been stable for more than ten years? Or should we first tackle the obstacles that always stand in the way of women who make this difficult choice? Marisol Toutaine has chosen: she is going to launch a vast national plan to improve access to abortion.