France legalizes right to abortion

March 7, 2024

French lawmakers approved a bill to enshrine abortion rights in France’s constitution, making it the only country to explicitly guarantee a woman’s right to voluntarily terminate a pregnancy.

Abortion enjoys wide support in France across most of the political spectrum, and has been legal since 1975.

The historic move was proposed by President Emmanuel Macron as a way to prevent the kind of rollback of abortion rights seen in the United States in recent years.
The measure was approved in a 780-72 vote in the Palace of Versailles.
Both houses of parliament, the National Assembly and the Senate, had already separately adopted a bill — as required — to amend Article 34 of the French Constitution.
The measure specifies that “the law determines the conditions by which is exercised the freedom of women to have recourse to an abortion, which is guaranteed.”