The delegation for women’s rights in the Assembly recommends raising the legal limit for performing a surgical abortion from 12 to 14 weeks of pregnancy.
- MPs Marie-Noëlle Battistel (PS) and Cécile Muschotti (LREM) recommend extending the period for surgical abortion by two weeks.
- Every year, 3 to 5,000 French women are forced to go abroad to have an abortion once the 12 weeks have passed.
A new parliamentary report, commissioned by the government in 2019, recommends extending the deadlines for recourse to voluntary termination of pregnancy (abortion) from twelve to fourteen weeks of pregnancy. A bill should follow.
An undervalued medical procedure
MPs Marie-Noëlle Battistel (PS) and Cécile Muschotti (LREM), authors of the report, advocate “to extend the time for surgical abortion by two weeks, from twelve to fourteen weeks of pregnancy, in order to prevent women from facing difficulties at the start of the process (medical wandering, delays in appointments, you too long…), find themselves out of time and unable to have an abortion performed in France.”
Timing problems aggravated by the coronavirus crisis, but not only. “In France, the main explanation for the difficulties of access to abortion is essentially the result of lack of interest in an undervalued medical act. note the deputies, who underline: “only 2.9% of general practitioners and gynecologists and 3.5% of midwives” performed an abortion in 2018.
Nearly one in three women will have an abortion in her lifetime. The number of abortions in France fluctuates between 225,000 and 230,000 operations each year, figures that have been stable since 2001. Each year, 3 to 5,000 French women are forced to go abroad, particularly to Spain and the Netherlands. , in order to abort once the legal 12 weeks have elapsed.
A sensible subject
Still, what concerns abortion is a sensitive subject: last May, the Senate refused a temporary extension of abortion deadlines for the duration of the health crisis. In July, a bill intended, on the contrary, “remove obstacles and improve the effectiveness of the right to abortion”, also planning “the extension of the legal deadlines for access to abortion from twelve to fourteen weeks” and the deletion “of the double conscience clause specific to abortion”.
The deputies who authored the text argued that the closure of the borders due to the coronavirus risked increasing clandestine abortions and the number of unwanted pregnancies, and underlined the territorial inequalities in terms of access to care (the High Council for Equality between women and men already alerted in 2013 to the fact that 130 establishments specializing in abortion had closed in the space of 10 years, editor’s note).
Medical termination of pregnancy (IMG) due to psychosocial distress
Also in the register of termination of pregnancies, amendment No. 524, adopted in August as part of the revision of bioethics laws, had caused an outcry on the Web. Concretely, the text, mainly supported by socialists, authorized medical termination of pregnancy (IMG) due to psychosocial distress of the mother.
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