The emotion was tangible in France's Sénat. Wednesday, February 28, marked "a new page in the history of women's rights," proclaimed Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti. Left-wing senators applauded, standing. The right-wing majority kept a low profile. The Sénat had just passed a bill to amend Article 34 of the Constitution to state that "the law determines the conditions under which the freedom guaranteed to women to have recourse to a voluntary termination of pregnancy is exercised."

This historic vote has paved the way for a joint session of Parliament to be convened in Versailles, where lawmakers from both chambers will have to vote by a three-fifths majority to enshrine this "freedom" to abortion in the Constitution. President Emmanuel Macron immediately posted a message on X to confirm that the joint session would be held on Monday, March 4: "I pledged to make women's freedom to have recourse to abortion irreversible by enshrining it in the Constitution. After the Assemblée Nationale, the Sénat is taking a decisive step, which I applaud."

It's the culmination of a parliamentary process that began on November 24, 2022, with the Assemblée Nationale voting through a bill put forward by Mathilde Panot, of La France Insoumise (LFI, radical left). The bill was drafted in reaction to the shockwave caused by the US Supreme Court's decision to revoke the federal right to abortion, on June 24, 2022.

A consensus was then reached, including in the Sénat, where, to everyone's surprise, the bill was adopted in February 2023, thanks to an amendment by a former aide to the famous abortion rights champion Simone Veil, Senator Philippe Bas (Les Républicains, LR, right). Instead of "the effectiveness of, and equal access to, the right to abortion," the Sénat's wording stated that "the law determines the conditions under which the freedom of a woman to terminate her pregnancy is exercised." The same wording was adopted by Macron's government after the president decided to move to enshrine abortion in the Constitution via a constitutional revision bill, avoiding a referendum, the other method for amending the Constitution.

In the space of just one year, positions changed in the Sénat: More than a hundred votes separate the results of the bill's first Sénat vote (166 for, 152 against) from the latest one (267 for, 50 against). "What we're voting on today is in the spirit of the Veil Law [which legalized abortion in 1975], it's a compromise bill," emphasized Laurence Rossignol, a Socialist senator and fervent supporter of the constitutionalization of abortion. "Let us say to our daughters, our nieces, our granddaughters: You are now and forever free to choose your lives," declared Green Senator Mélanie Vogel.

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