CIVICUS speaks with Floriane Volt, Director of Public and Legal Affairs at the Women’s Foundation (Fondation des Femmes), about recent changes to the French Constitution to include the right to abortion.
The Women’s Foundation is a leading French organisation working for women’s rights and freedoms and against gender-based violence.
Where did the initiative to enshrine the right to abortion in the French Constitution come from?
Women’s right to control their own bodies is an essential condition for women’s freedom and equality between women and men. So enshrining the right to abortion in the constitution was both a necessity and a consecration of women’s rights and equality.
It is the role of the constitution – the founding text of our society, which protects the fundamental rights of all citizens – to safeguard the right to control one’s own body. It is an additional guarantee for all women. It will now also prove more difficult to challenge it as it will require constitutional reform, a more complex process than simply deleting it from a piece of legislation.
Feminist organisations have long called for abortion to be enshrined in the constitution. It was one of the programmatic proposals put forward by the Women’s Foundation and other feminist organisations during the 2022 presidential election. Back in 2017, a female senator, Laurence Cohen, tabled a bill to include this right in the constitution.
The US Supreme Court’s June 2022 ruling reversing its decision to protect abortion sent shockwaves through the French political scene, and many people called for the right to abortion to be enshrined in the constitution.
It took two years of hard work by organisations such as the Women’s Foundation, Family Planning and the Abortion Europe collective, supported by committed members of parliament, to achieve this. This real feminist victory was achieved thanks to the solid union of feminists.
It was also the victory of all the French men and women massively in favour of this reform. In the space of three weeks, almost 110,000 people mobilised to urge the Senate to approve it, as part of an appeal by Women’s Foundation on Change.org.
How did public opinion react to this demand?
Over 86 per cent of French people were in favour of enshrining the right to abortion in the constitution.
Just look at the thousands who gathered on the afternoon of 4 March to celebrate constitutional change on the Plaza of Human Rights and Liberties at Trocadéro, a highly symbolic place chosen by the Women’s Foundation to broadcast the vote, in keeping with the historic gravity of the moment.
This strong public support, combined with the relentless fight of feminist organisations, overcame the resistance of the Senate right, who argued there was no real threat to abortion in France.
Beyond France, this is a victory and a very strong signal for all women and feminists around the world who are fighting for access to this right. There is every chance that this initiative will be taken up by other European Union (EU) states. In any case, that’s one of the aims of all this mobilisation: to set an example.
A European Citizens’ Initiative has been submitted to the European Commission calling on the EU to fund abortion for anyone in Europe who does not have access to it.
What strategies would you recommend to reproductive rights activists in other European countries and beyond?
What worked in France is a solid union of organisations fighting for women’s rights and wider civil society supported by political representatives, particularly female senators and deputies who have been able to take this shared project into institutions.
This union was the result of a long process of coordination and the creation of links between feminist organisations to reach agreement on a common goal.
It also seemed essential to us to have reliable and relevant data and studies on abortion rights. For instance, to build our case we relied on a survey showing that this constitutional revision was supported by the majority of French people, commissioned by the Women’s Foundation and Family Planning and carried out in February 2021.
Several reports on the organisation and threat posed by anti-choice movements also highlighted the importance of enshrining the right to abortion in the constitution. These included a report by the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights on the massive funding of anti-choice movements in Europe and a report by the Women’s Foundation and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue on the threat posed by the presence of anti-abortion movements on social media.
What’s next on the women’s rights agenda in France?
In the wake of #MeToo, feminist organisations that have been warning of the scale and seriousness of sexist and sexual violence for decades have finally found a real echo. Society is gradually becoming aware of this huge phenomenon.
Yet the figures from the justice system still show the unbearable impunity for perpetrators of sexual violence: while 94,000 adult women are victims of rape or attempted rape every year in France, fewer than one in three assailants are prosecuted. A lot more #MeToo efforts remain to be done to resolve the paradox of a society that is convinced it has become aware of the scale of sexual violence but imposes no consequences on those responsible for it.
We are faced with a lack of political action. At the Women’s Foundation, we have always campaigned for a political response commensurate with the stakes involved, which would include an increase in the budget allocation. In light of the increase in requests from victims, we have revised the figure upwards. In a report published in September 2023, we estimated the need at between €2.3 and €3.2 billion (approx. US$2.45 and 3.4 billion) a year.
Yet the trend is still towards budgetary rigour. At the beginning of March 2024, the economy minister announced savings of €7 million (approx. US$7.46 million) in the gender equality area of the 2024 budget. This budget cut represents a 10 per cent reduction on the €77 million (approx. US$82 million) budget approved in December, at a time when there is an urgent need to give more resources to the organisations that provide care for women victims of violence.
Civic space in France is rated ‘narrowed’ by the CIVICUS Monitor.
Get in touch with the Women’s Foundation through its website, its Instagram account or its Facebook page, follow @Fondationfemmes and @FVolt on Twitter, and contact Floriane Volt on LinkedIn.
