France enshrines 'freedom' to abortion in Constitution, in world first
lemonde.fr
lemonde.fr
There was only one major group that spoke out against the decision: the Catholic Church.
Almost half of the French population reported that they were Catholic in a 2020 survey, but it's clear that when it comes to abortion, almost no French Catholics are influenced by the Church's strong opposition to abortion.
That's in stark contrast to the US, where opposition to abortion, mostly among Christian denominations, has remained an intractable issue. People predicted that after Roe V. Wade was decided, opposition to abortion would fade away, but it never did. Indeed, for the better part of 50 years, opposition fluctuated only a few percentage points, unlike almost every other major social issue.
If you break that down generationally, you see 70% in 70+, scaling down to about 15% in young adults, with atheism mopping up the difference. The older people may have believed, the middle cohort were raised by believers and think of themselves as Catholic by creed, but they haven't passed it on to their kids.
The same is generally true in the rest of Europe. The social contract that everyone goes to church on Sunday has broken.
If it were that self-apparent, wouldn't we expect Kant, Kierkegaard, Anselm, Anscombe, Heidegger, Gödel, or the countless other philosophers and heavy thinkers of the past several centuries to have not even wrestled with the question?
Heck, even Antony Flew, a contemporary philosopher of religion who was a staunch advocate of atheism for much of his career, later declared himself a theist. Did he simply fail to realize that it's pretty obvious that religion is make-believe?
What do you know that they didn't? What did they know that you might not?
I've heard both theists and atheists express similar feelings about the implications of physicalism (I think that's the term, but I'm not a philosopher), but I've never understood why in anything other than an abstract sense. I can understand why someone would be concerned by things ending so finally, but it's not like you'll be around afterward to feel bad about it. If anything I find it very comforting.
I can understand wanting to be around for other people, but afaik there are plenty of religions where people aren't able to intervene after death and I don't hear the same concerns about those.
Supposedly secular western people invoke the same basic concept. For example, they talk about things like "human dignity": https://www.humanrightscareers.com/issues/definitions-what-i... ("At its most basic, the concept of human dignity is the belief that all people hold a special value that’s tied solely to their humanity."). That papers over God as the source of "human dignity" but it's expressing the same basic belief. That assertion makes no logical sense if you abandon the underlying metaphysical notion and posit that humans are actually just meat.
Abstract concepts, even ones considered materially 'incomprehensible' like love, or ones considered materially inconsistent or impossible like taking the square root of a circle, are names - very long, patterned symbol sequences condensed from salient features of the far more complex structures they reflect, objects that would be otherwise inconvenient to discuss or contemplate on human time scales and within human constraints. Abstract information, any information, is the result of an energetic compromise necessary for our relatively insubstantial chunk of brain tissue to be able to play-manipulate objects far greater in scale, scope and remoteness then it physically could interact with. But it is still physically manipulating them, or rather the lightest of lightweight representations of them, at the mechnical, physical matrix of neurological energy exchange processes.
First, the "God of the gaps" has basically disappeared. All natural phenomena in our personal experience are understood well enough that we can say with confidence that nothing supernatural is required to explain them. That doesn't mean that every individual understands them well enough, and while it's not a hard binary distinction, there is certainly a correlation between spirituality / belief in the supernatural and lack of understanding of natural science.
Second, religion is to a large extent social glue. As humans increasingly live in large cities, social glue in general is disappearing, and religion is just one facet of that.
This is actually an integral part of the Catholic intellectual tradition, which is why Catholic philosophy (see St Thomas Aquinas for example) can incorporate insights from pagans, Muslims and Jews. Hans Urs von Balthasar took inspiration from an even wider variety of thinkers. I could go on but hopefully I've made my point.
What came before the big bang? And why does it seem that all matter came from one location in space? Seems to break the second law of Thermodynamics even. We don't know. Will you put your faith in the idea that the system of science CAN EVEN know eventually?
Can set theory prove everything? We know that it cannot prove a number of things, thanks Turing. Those things end up being pretty important to proving everything evidently. Science rests on mathematics.
Why should you believe in a particular philosopher's revealed truth? Well it seems consistent with the rules of logic. Seeing as set theory is the most concrete, repeatable form of logic we've ever come up with, see the above for why thats maybe not the best stance to put your faith in.
Maybe believe in nothing? But you will believe in something, even by accident. The nature of human heart is to make idols.
All require leaps of faith at the bottom of them. Either in systems or individuals.
My two cents, before thinking about the Catholic Church or any Church's claims for that matter, form a relationship with Jesus/God. You seem like a pretty tuned in person, I feel that you will find your answers. If we are made in His image, and He gave his only Son up to be tortured and killed for us, there is no way your suffering goes unnoticed.
Without that relationship, every Church is just a bunch of rules to follow, and ya, that would really suck to be involved with. God bless you on your journey.
Philosophy - is backed by reasoned arguments and open to debate
Mathematics - is our construction, how can we not believe in our own invention
Religion - requires that you buy into an archaic fairy tale, with no empirical proof or reasoned argument, to the extent that you will sanction wars and oppressive gender inequality on the basis of unsubstantiated belief
...
One of these things is not like the others
What the evidence shows is that we are meat, with sentience being an illusion of complex chemical reactions. What “rights” does meat have? Why can’t we, for example, kill drug dealers, if that would make life on earth—the only kind of life there is—better for all the other meat sacks? The Chinese communists at least practiced atheism correctly and followed it to its logical conclusions.
I think a more accurate characterization would be that European Christianity has evolved into a different religion which retains the notion of the divinity of the individual, but drops explicit references to God.
Vatican II Is A New Religion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX97Qg4DIJU
The Figures on the post-Vatican II decline https://vaticancatholic.com/29_Figures.pdf
1. In Europe it is sort of the default state. Everyone belongs to the same Church. It is not really part of one's identity. American Christians are so splintered that being part of a Church means being part of a significantly smaller community and that plays a much bigger role in forming one's identity. The community aspect of Church is similarly more pronounced in the US for this reason.
2. American Jesus is your personal trainer, your protector, your personal cheerleader, your forever companion. European Jesus is technically supposed to also be those things but nobody really buys into it. The fervent belief in the efficacy of prayer is completely lacking. That gives people less incentive to go to Church.
I grew up in the Republic of Ireland during the 1980s when the vast majority (more than 90%) of people identified as Roman Catholics. I took it all very seriously (prayed multiple times each day, read the bible, a little theology, lives of saints, etc.) but my fellow Christians didn’t take anywhere near seriously: attending Mass on a Sunday, first communions, confirmations, weddings and funerals. While they might vote against abortion and divorce and send their children to Catholic schools, their beliefs didn’t really impact their daily lives.
Some of my parents’ generation believed in the efficacy of prayer:I always had my other and other relations praying for me during exams and if anyone was ever sick or having medical treatment, they would be prayed for. But most of my own generation didn’t share this belief in the efficacy of prayer. They certainly didn’t buy into the concept of Jesus/God being an integral part of their lives.
The Catholic church had the dominant position, so other than controlling educational, medical and other institutes, it provide its members with the same sense of community as that of Church of Ireland and other minority religions.
On the other hand, with its diversity of Christian churches, north of the border was much more like how you describe the US. The identity with religion was (is) much stronger as it usually corresponds with the individual’s national identity (Irish or British).
Note: Support for the Catholic Church in the Republic declined drastically in the nineties when the church lost its moral authority as news came out about how the hierarchy had facilitated child abuse and various other scandals.
My grandparents (farmers) went to church every Sunday. In those days it was kind of like a central meeting place to meet your neighbors. The Church back then also tried to push certain rules on people, that people for obvious reasons didn't like so much. I know my grandma never really believed in god, but my grandpa did.
My parents are like half-believers. I guess they believe in something, but that generation already knows Jesus didn't really walk on water etc. They might still believe in an afterlife. They had periods where we went to church every week, and other periods where we didn't go.
Then my generation: we were raised in school as rational people. And as you might know, rationality and religion never go well together. None of my male buddies believes in any religion. We might have a good laugh about it, and find the concept overall ludicrous and obviously false. It's 100% clear to us that it's all bullshit and make-believe.
For the women, they believe in "something", something "bigger than us". That's all I can say about it.
But overall, the Church has lost it's power due to lecturing people what they should and shouldn't do, and also obvious false claims, misconduct, etc. Nobody likes the one who claims to know better than the rest.
My wife is from Slovakia, and I would say they are running about 1 generation behind concerning religion. Churches there are now getting less and less people, while in Belgium that already happened a generation ago.
We still have certain regions that are more religious than others. And I know in the Netherlands there is a 'bible belt' where people are extremely religious, not taking anti-conception and all those other rules (they end up having 12 kids).
If you teach people rationality and learning to be sceptic, it's hard to sell them on something where you can live forever, as long as you follow some rules made up 2000 years ago.
So all info basically came from what they knew from their parents, the farm, their neighbors, and on Sunday what the priest said. There were school teachers of course, which were regarded the same as a doctor or lawyer. But their own knowledge was probably also very limited science wise.
Like I said before, even if they didn't really believe, they would still go to Church on Sunday. One of my granddads had a more religious family, and his brother was a Monk and sister a Nun.
My parents know the introduction of radio & TV. People get smarter, know more, probably also start questioning things more. And my generation, well, we had an excellent education. It's very hard to not start questioning things.
In the end, I think it starts deteriorating step by step. First it starts out with "Probably Jesus didn't really walk on water, it's just a matter of speech." And then it's other things. People get smarter, in their own lifetime but also over generations. It wouldn't surprise me if my grandparents and parents were more religious when they were younger.
Also, I was told there was a cinema where people would go to watch movies (before TV). The priest would go see the new movie first, and then tell everyone if they were allowed to go see that movie or not. People don't like that kind of control, and start rebelling against it. "The priest sees all the dirty things but we're not allowed".
At least for me, it feels like I started questioning things. I believed in God up until I was around 12. It also felt rebellious to know that it was all bullshit, while everyone else said it was real. But I guess it wasn't really rebellious since almost all boys of my age thought the same thing, especially at the age of 15.
In France particularly, the state is aggressively secular. They go out of their way to ensure no religion has any footing in any part of government and this occasionally makes it hard to be religious if you're unable to wear the expected garb or paraphernalia at school or at your government job.
The French have a long history of not wanting a single unimpeachable ruler. God just isn't welcome.
It’s really interesting to me how recently some “modern, first-world countries” were still dictatorships or still undergoing rapid democratization. France, Spain, and Korea are all dramatic examples, we totally don’t think of it in this context but at the start of the 80s Korea was a backwater under a military dictatorship, in the 50s France was a quasi dictatorship under de Gaulle with internal instability and unrest, Spain was under a fascist dictator until 1975, etc.
Plus there is the other factor that the structure of European cities and societies is much more amenable to protests and political action, where the US citizenry is atomized by design.
In 2020, our parliament voted for abortion up to 9 months for mother's psychological motivations. So a murder during childbirth...
Fortunately some people noticed (not the journalists) that it may be harsh for the doctor doing the act. It didn't pass the Senate.
https://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/loi-bioethique-ces-...
https://www.liberation.fr/checknews/2020/08/04/projet-de-loi...
Also I'm not up to date on french abortion law or anything but people like to make these comparisons without taking into account medical-cultural differences that are extremely relevant. In the US an abortion cutoff is likely to truly be the last date you can access one at all, except maybe for life threatening medical situations but even that exception is being closed out. In the french model the cutoff date is the last date you can access one on your own initiative without significant barriers. After that they get increasingly difficult with a higher degree of medical and possibly legal scrutiny, but the threshold is still far below "you must be dying" for most of that time.
Just as women should have the freedom from parenthood, so should men. But if a woman chooses to have a child, the man is still compelled to fatherhood, at least from a financial perspective.
And in France specifically, you have no right to know if you are actually the presumed father via paternity test.
So while this is some degree of progress, the already-enormous disparity of reproductive rights has widened even more.
Cruely, the answer usually seems to be "Well, don't have sex then". The only reproductive right men have at all is the choice to use the limited birth control available to them (condoms).
If they are lied to about their partner being on birth control then they are automatically out of the picture when it comes to choice around "what happens after". I would love to see a birth control pill for men, though the typical sexist response to that I've heard from many women is "men would just forget to take it as if we could trust them". Tables turning.
We are in the greatest demographic, energy and financial crisis since the Second World War and on the verge of armed conflict with Russia. Our legislators have repeatedly refused to have a say on these issues in recent months, but while we had no problem with the status of abortion in France, they took up the issue as soon as there was a problem about it in the USA.
As they say at the UN and the European Commission: "always put a Frenchman at the head of all international institutions, they are the only ones who will never defend the interests of their country".
For example you can't analyse French racism issues using the American history of slavery, the end result might be somewhat similar but the historical path is widely different. You can't use the French abortion history to analyse the American one either
No pandoras box, just reality.
So again, either the law is enough, and if it is enough it is enough for abortions, or it isn't enough for abortion, but in that case: which laws are constitution worthy and which aren't ?
You either don't get it, or want the door for such reversals to remain open. The former has been explained a lot by now, the latter would be disengenious.
Since the 80s, it's over, France has been led financially by Germany, culturally by the USA, and its politicians are trained abroad or work abroad after having done their worst inside.
Nuclear power is really the best example, France was the world leader, then the Germans pushed it to abandon everything including its future Phoenix program. France sold everything to the USA, and now the USA is launching a nuclear program in Eastern Europe, and they call it Phoenix...
E.g. NATO membership means a country isn't souvereign (independent is notbthe correct term) anymore. Or ignoring that France was a foibding member of the EWG. Or believing Hermany controls the EU (a claim that dates back to the financial crisis of 2008 and was as wrong then as it is now), or that Germany (small correction, you actually mean the German Greens) forced France to halt nuclear power. Or ignoring that the US nuclear industry is doing not great, including after the purchase of French companies. I could go on, but you get the picture I hope.
We had a global pandemic that blocked the whole world for a couple of years and a war that required changes to the whole energy strategy. I think France is doing quite ok given that.
Roe v Wade brought the issue up to many people, and I was appalled at how many of my colleagues and friends were dismayed at the idea of the constitution not backing up the right to abortion, some crazy people those in the US huh?
...Except we don't have such constitutional protection in Spain either. We just have a law. If it is the opinion of society that the constitution ought to give a right, It's a great thing for the country to take that into account and actually walk the walk.
In reality, the Supreme Court in 1973 subverted democracy by striking down abortion laws every state had adopted through the democratic process. In 2022, the Supreme Court restored the issue to the democratic process.
This is basically true, and a really serious indictment of democracy in America. All sorts of important rights, such as racial equality and equality of marriage (not just gay marriage, but interracial marriage!) had to be secured through legal action against a tyrannical and indifferent majority.
5: No person shall […] be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
9: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
10: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
"Because you say so! …Is not good enough for me.
"Because you say so! …They take our liberty!
"Because you say so! …With guns to our heads!
"Because you say so! …They want patriots dead!"
-Right Arm of Wyoming https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YQVyesTRLWU
First of all, the Constitution can be changed, like it has been in this case.
Secondly, it says that “The law determines the conditions under which [..] (it) is exercised”
So it can be made hard enough to challenge the right to abortion, like it is now in Italy, where it is virtually fully granted, but practically impossible in some areas, due to a Constitutional reform (ironically) that transitioned the healthcare from a national system to a regional one. So it depends on who's in charge in the region.
Since 2001, a decisive transition is taking place, from decentralisation to true federalism, according to the principle of subsidiarity. As of 2001, the national health fund has been abolished and substituted by taxation yield directly attributed to Regions and autonomous Provinces
https://www.salute.gov.it/resources/static/primopiano/unione... (PDF, page 92)
•The federal government is only authorized to exercise those powers delegated to it.
•The people of the several states retain the authority to exercise any power that is not delegated to the federal government as long as the Constitution doesn’t expressly prohibit it.
Why can't the EU Declaration of Human Rights not just be amended to include it?
No need to be more specific - actually that might be for the worse - states/lawmakers could start arguing it has to be explicit about every possible procedure like in the abortion case.
And yes, it seems that for the time being, abortion is not really ubder threat in the EU at the moment, so they can focus on other things. I applaud France for doing this, and hope the EU, and more member nations, do follow suite in the future.
They might say - it killed the fetus. Yes. Sometimes people disconnect the life support.
I myself am not sure if I consider the fetus a part of the mother or not. There definitely is a point when it is no longer a part of the mother and I don't think it's only at birth. But regardless of the exact transition point, the mother has the right to decide what is connected to her body.
The EHCR did the same thing with same-sex marriage. It declined to read Article 12, which guarantees a right to marriage, to confer a right to same-sex marriages.
Our Constitution, in reality, is much more than the words written in it. It’s morphed due to judicial precedent over the course of 200 or so years.
Might is right, in that dead people don't get to decide anything. If the next generation growing up decided to not respect Congress, then in a generation the entire institution would cease.
Hardly anyone defend’s Roe’s original reasoning anymore, because it makes no sense. That’s why over the decades the defense of Roe has largely been reduced to the assertion that it’s precedent. It’s the left’s Lochner.
Invoking “experts” is unavailing because those experts are not speaking within the scope of their expertise. Their assertions are in the realm of moral philosophy, not law. It’s a religious edict within the church of secular humanism.
I did not argue form authority but because I was not advancing the idea that abortion is a constitutional right. I was advancing the idea that there are experts who think it is. And experts who think otherwise.
But it is not a logical fallacy to use the opinions of an expert in their area of expertise. You know virtually nothing about quantum mechanics and in a discussion about quantum mechanics it is valid to defer to what an expert says on that topic. Indeed, the court system understands the value of expert testimony for good reason. They know that using an expert in their area of expertise is valid and carries weight. Of course that does not mean experts are always right. Just means they know more than you.
None of this is germane to the point I made. I was not arguing from authority. I was talking about what I originally wrote versus what you replied with. Read what I originally wrote. Your point made no sense unless you can show that it is universally agreed by judges (or other experts in law) that there is no constitutional basis for a right to an abortion.
I think it is a fact that courts do sometimes use expert testimony. If that is not the case then strike that portion from my response to rayiner. It isn't needed to make my point which is that relying on expert advice is not an argumentative fallacy.
It is strange that a brilliant lawyer and technologist would try to refute the citing of an expert's opinion by referencing a website. You can see the irony in that, right? You do realize that referring to an "authority" is not a valid way to advance the notion that referring to authorities is wrong, right?
This is what I wrote:
Highly intelligent legal experts in the form of Supreme Court justices determined that states can’t ban abortions. Other equally intelligent legal experts in the form of Supreme Court justices determined otherwise. Both sets of people wrote cogent opinions in support of their position. What is one to make of these facts? The Constitution says what you want it to say and you can write a well written, well reasoned argument supporting what you want it to say.
Our Constitution, in reality, is much more than the words written in it. It’s morphed due to judicial precedent over the course of 200 or so years.
I'm not advancing the notion that abortion is a right or that it isn't a right. I'm not making any legal arguments whatsoever except to say that legal experts disagree on matters of constitutional law. I'm not making an appeal to authority to advance my argument because I'm not saying that my conclusion:
Our Constitution, in reality, is much more than the words written in it. It’s morphed due to judicial precedent over the course of 200 or so years.
is supported by anyone with legal expertise. I'm just saying that there is no single objectively true way to decide what is or isn't a constitutional right as I see it. This is an opinion I have and I gave the reasons I have for this opinion. If someone want to refute this conclusion of mine they need to demonstrate that there is a single objectively true way to decide constitutional rights.
If I'm wrong please let me know what this single objectively true way is.
Referencing appeal to authority has nothing to do with my point. Referencing rayner's legal expertise is not germane to anything I wrote. His reasoning in response to what I wrote is quite bad.
It is a fact that referencing an "authority" to advance the notion that referencing authorities is a logical fallacy is bad reasoning.
A majority of current, GOP-appointed Supreme Court justices disagree with you.
… because I'm not saying that my conclusion:
And originalism is one way of interpreting the Constitution. There are other methods that other legal experts employ. Which is my only point. There is no single objectively correct way to interpret the Constitution. So it’s incorrect, for the most part, to say, “this is what the Constitution says/means”. One should say, “this is what i think it means.”
Likewise. Appealing to rayiner's expertise is extremely strange when it is done to support their belief that appealing to authority is logically invalid.
> You have not shown that no one with equal or more knowledge and expertise
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
Your response in suppoort of rayiner is to appeal to Rayiner's expertise.
The government doesn't have the right to force one person to risk their life for another. In this sense one can reasonably argue that one has a constitutional right to an abortion.
I guess you haven't served in the military?
The government does not have a right to force me to directly use my body or parts of it to save your life. Thus is the essence that some lawyers have argued and reasoned.
According to whom? And even if you believe that, why does that mean the constitution bakes in that belief?
The French right wing of the senate has made this seemingly unimportant edit: it's not a right to abortion, it's a freedom.
This changes everything.
If it's a freedom, the job of the government is to ensure that nobody can stop you from doing it, but unlike with a right, it has no obligation of means, it doesn't have to fund free abortion clinics, make sure that hospitals are properly staffed, that every woman on the French territory has actually access to a clinic without travelling long distances or paying an unaffordable price.
there are news circulating here that the right wing is celebrating, it must be about that.
And we all fall for it. Again.
it simply means that your freedom is guaranteed, not the actual right.
legalese is a very sneaky duolingo.
In the Italian constitution the catholics replaced the sentence in the first article proposed by the left "Italy is a democratic Republic founded on workers." with "Italy is a democratic Republic founded on labour." which completely changed the intended meaning (it works much better in Italian where workers is "lavoratori" and labour is "lavoro", they look and sound very similar, but are not the same thing).
> there is not much pro-live can be happy about
but they are, there must be a reason.
How are 'conflicting freedoms' resolved? If two people have freedom of bodily autonomy, is there a priority?
Or taking a step back, what responsibilities (if any) do we have towards other people?
> Plenty of philosophers have argued that personhood hinges on rational capacity: that a being cannot be said to be owed the rights and protections promised in the Declaration of Independence unless it is capable of higher-level reasoning or unless it has, among other things, a sense of self, and can desire not to be killed. Personhood understood in this way legitimizes abortion at any stage, since what is killed does not, on this view, have rights. But it also legitimizes the killing of infants and young children, of the severely mentally disabled, and some of those suffering from dementia.
> If one rejects this restrictive, ableist understanding of personhood, what are the other options? Some philosophers point out that we do tend to make assessments of moral worth on capacity, but that we tend to make those assessments not on individual capacity, but on the capacities characteristic of the species to which the individual in question belongs. We think it worse to kill a dolphin than an ant because dolphins as a species have more sophisticated rational capacities than ants do. If we understand personhood in this way, then all members of our species — the elderly, the mentally disabled, infants and fetuses — are people.
[…]
> It is possible, of course, to acknowledge the personhood of the fetus and still defend abortion. Half a century ago the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson, conceding that the fetus becomes a person well before birth, famously argued that the personhood of the fetus does not make the mother’s decision to kill it unjust. Killing the fetus is unjust, Thomson argued, only if the mother first agrees to carry it. But this, again, is a philosophical question. Do we owe others only what we agree to owe them?
> Some philosophers, like Thomson, think so, but very many philosophers disagree. If I live alone in the woods and wake one day to find an infant on my doorstep, am I obligated to care for it? Or may I simply step over it and go on about my day, until it dies from exposure and neglect? To think I am obligated in justice to help it, as a great many people (philosophers and non-philosophers alike) do, is to think we owe things to other people simply because they are people. And if we can owe things to other people simply because they are people, then Thomson’s argument falls apart. If the fetus becomes a person long before birth — as even Thomson concedes — and if we can owe things to people simply because they are people, then we can owe things to the fetus as well, long before birth.
* https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2022/06/05/phi...
What is the zygote/fetus/whatever? Is it human? If it is human, is it a person? When / At what point does it/he/she go from being a not-a-person to being a person? Why at that point and not some other? Do we have any responsibilities to the (non-)persons?
Is it possible to have "objective" answers to any of these questions, or are they 'simply' determined by "subjective" feelings?
"La loi détermine les conditions dans lesquelles s’exerce la liberté garantie à la femme d’avoir recours à une interruption volontaire de grossesse."
> The law shall determine the conditions in which a woman can exercise her guaranteed right to abortion.
Taken from: https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/16/dossiers/liberte_i...
All these fucks voting out protections THEY ENJOYED their entire reproductive lives is so damn infuriating.
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/11/tennessee-governor-...
This isn't about that scenario. In case you get an abortion for a purely medical reason you can abort at any point in the pregnancy, 1 week or 9 months, it doesn't matter.
The one we just put in the constitution is the type of abortion you can request for any reasons up to 14 weeks
Also I'm not sure what's the extent of this right. In France, AFIU in normal circumstances, you can't legally abort after 14 weeks. Is that challenged by this new constitutional rule?
EDIT: even though Macron ultimately proposed this, it was initiated by a far-left representative, Mathilde Panot. Her party, LFI, advertises this as their own victory.
https://www.lepoint.fr/societe/ivg-dans-la-constitution-math...
> Mathilde Panot, présidente du groupe La France insoumise à l'Assemblée nationale, a été à l'initiative de la proposition de loi constitutionnelle pour garantir le droit à l'IVG.
Edit: actually, it does state that the [current] law determines the boundaries of that protection.
I've actually had this discussion two years ago? With a doctor who specialized in finding out genetic defects in the 90s, basically it's very rare to have abortion after the 14th week, and it's only when some developmental issues are found, or when carrying the pregnancy is dangerous (in some cases labor is induced while the pregnant woman under anesthesia, but the fœtus is known to be unviable, those forced labor seems to be the worst situation mentally for patient and sometime medical personnel)
Ironically abortion has been abolished in Poland after it joined the EU.
In 1932 it was the first country in Europe outside the Soviet Union to legalize abortion in cases of rape and threat to maternal health
> “The law determines the conditions under which the freedom guaranteed to women to resort to voluntary termination of pregnancy is exercised”
So it doesn't really address the issue, it just uses the words "voluntary termination of pregnancy" associated with guaranteed freedom for the first time in history.
Securing these de facto rights and transforming them into de jure rights makes a lot of sense to me, in light of that.
And pretending that not to be the case, well, I feel insulted by being played for an idiot.
Two years earlier, the US Supreme Court had struck down any state regulation of abortion prior to viability (around 22-24) weeks. Effectively, it imposed an abortion regime far broader than France’s by judicial fiat.
Few people in France oppose abortion laws as they are today, but the abortion restrictions are quite different compared to the US. E.g. abortion time limit in France are much shorter in "usual" cases, ~3.5 months. It was 3 month until quite recently, and that extension was controversial.
[edit] controversial, but nowhere near as controversial as abortion is in the US. I wonder how controversial extension to 2nd or 3rd trimester would be in France. Those later-terms are legal only under exceptions in France (rape, danger to the mother, etc.).
As for the conditions, the French constitution usually states general principles so it won't and doesn't need to be as precise as having a number of weeks.
So will it make a practical difference or is it just a gesture?
> from far-left parties
No. Emmanuel Macron, the president, fairly right-sided, pushed it and then everybody welcomed it except some people at the right.
Now of course he could use something good for his image, he pretty much pissed most people a few months ago with how he used every non democratic ways he could to push his retirement reform despite a majority of people being against it (including people mostly agreeing with the content of this reform, but not comfortable with how he handled it).
Actually far-left sided parties are vanishingly small and wouldn't have the power to push something like this.
> who are utterly powerless when it comes to economic policies
Off-topic and not needed here.
Edit to answer the edit: La France Insoumise is hardly far left. It is roughly between le parti socialiste which had almost vanished two years ago, and le parti communiste, itself before Lutte Ouvrière and the NPA. I believe "far" is synonymous with "ideas I really don't like" and better avoided anyway. It doesn't do any good, let's properly reject bad ideas with proper arguments instead.
>Off-topic and not needed here.
French politics is off-topic in a thread on French politics?
This inflammatory gratuitous hot take without any evidence to prove it on a subject unrelated to the discussion at hand (far left parties are not especially more related to this new constitutional abortion right than any other party) just doesn't belong here and will probably not lead to interesting discussions. Whether it is true or not.
LFI (france far left party) wants to call this "Loi Panot" and claim the victory. Panot is the LFI representative who has initiated this law. Macron eventually thought it would be good to surf this wave.
> Dans une publication partagée sur X, le groupe parlementaire a réalisé un montage illustrant Mathilde Panot, la cheffe de file des Insoumis, aux côtés de Simone Veil, icône de la lutte contre la discrimination des femmes en France. « On l'a fait ! » illustre l'image avec « #LoiPanot ».
Also see, you mentioned "far left parties". That felt undocumented, and looked like a platitude. It's one party, for starters. Hand wavy statements will just gather evasive and inaccurate answers.
To be honest, I initially imagined you were not French and making undocumented claims on French politics, I now understand you are French (you stated it).
How to spot far-left: they want to go beyond representative democracy: direct democracy and/or autogestion are their desired end goal. They want to remove executive power (no mayor or president by default), and their view on legislative power differ too much to matter
LFI '6th republic' still is a representative republic, with a more participative glow than the 5th, but is basically the same. They are pro-constitutionalists (basically it mean they will respect the judicial power), want to weaken the executive power but not remove it, to go back to a more northern European kind of democracy.
Far right is basically antidemocracy. That can have different form, recently in France, attacks on elected officials, or on judges.
From [1] > Mathilde Panot (French pronunciation: [matild pano]; born 15 January 1989) is a far-left French politician who has presided over the La France Insoumise group in the National Assembly since October 2021.
Then, "La France Insoumise" claims the victory and brand this law as "loi Panot" on their own youtube page [2],
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathilde_Panot [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyllRDbKWtc
Me neither, to be clear.
> they are classified as far-left
By whom? Some small portion of its detractors? Anyway, no need for spreading wrong ideas, regardless the number of people claiming them. French Wikipedia claims this but this is unsubstantiated. Qualifying it as "far" just serves the purpose of wrongly likening it to the Rassemblement National, which is convenient for Macron & its friends. Consequences of LFI or the RN gaining power are radically different.
Now for sure it's not "soft" left.
I believe you when you say LFI pushed this idea. That's very like them.
[0] https://www.francetvinfo.fr/societe/ivg/vrai-ou-fake-avortem...