The enshrinement of women's "guaranteed freedom" to have an abortion in the French Constitution was both a symbolic victory and a step forward for women's rights. However, this should not hide the fact that there are still obstacles to accessing abortion in France. Lawmakers were not mistaken about this. At every review of the legislation – first the draft law, then the constitutional bill – by the Assemblée nationale and the Sénat, both opponents and supporters of this reform put forward conflicting arguments about women's effective access to this right, and about the limits that should or should not be set.
At the heart of these debates was the question of time limits for recourse to abortion, and – even more so – that of the "double conscience clause" for doctors introduced by the "Veil Law," named after French minister and abortion rights pioneer Simone Veil. This clause, which allowed doctors to personally refuse to perform an abortion, was a recognition that the real issue – over and above the protection afforded by the March 4 constitutionalization – was actually the availability of abortion, a procedure that around 230,000 women undergo every year in France, a relatively stable figure.
What are the obstacles faced by those who don't wish to continue a pregnancy today? Despite legislation that has improved access to abortion over the decades, these barriers take many forms.
Negative online messages
Consider the example of a woman who discovers that she's pregnant and decides to have an abortion. If she looks for information online, she runs the risk of stumbling across sites that claim to be neutral, but which convey negative, anxiety-inducing messages about abortion and its consequences. Admittedly, this practice is now punishable under the law which extended the offense of obstructing abortion to the online world, which was passed in 2017. Since then, efforts have been made by public authorities, in conjunction with Google, to modify these sites' search engine listings and make them less accessible. However, anti-abortion rhetoric is now concentrated on social media, according to a study by the Fondation des Femmes NGO, published in January.
Disinformation on abortion is thus widely disseminated on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and X, which in recent years has been driven by a renewed mobilization of "anti-choicers," particularly on the European level. These movements have also manifested themselves in real life: On March 8, International Women's Day – but which this year was also the date of the ceremony enshrining abortion in the Constitution – the Lille branch of the French Family Planning Movement was targeted, its windows tagged with several messages likening abortion to murder.
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