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.
Securing these de facto rights and transforming them into de jure rights makes a lot of sense to me, in light of that.
> 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.
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
>Off-topic and not needed here.
French politics is off-topic in a thread on French politics?
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 ».
[0] https://www.francetvinfo.fr/societe/ivg/vrai-ou-fake-avortem...
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?
Edit: actually, it does state that the [current] law determines the boundaries of that protection.
> “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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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...
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.
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.
"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...
there are news circulating here that the right wing is celebrating, it must be about that.
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?
All these fucks voting out protections THEY ENJOYED their entire reproductive lives is so damn infuriating.
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
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/11/tennessee-governor-...
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.
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...
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.
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.
