For the executive, it is a last social reform which has above all the advantage of sending a signal to the left before the presidential election.

Parliament will vote on Wednesday to extend the abortion period, by adopting a text from an opposition MP but supported by the majority.

The bill plans to extend the legal period for voluntary termination of pregnancy from 12 to 14 weeks to respond to a lack of practitioners and the gradual closure of abortion centers.

It will be voted definitively in the afternoon, via a final vote of the Assembly, at the end of a long parliamentary journey started in October 2020.

Macron's reluctance

Presented by the former MP En Marche Albane Gaillot, who has become an ecologist, the transpartisan text was pushed by the president of the LREM deputies Christophe Castaner.

Nothing was certain and this choice could be presented as a rare mark of independence of the LREM group vis-à-vis Emmanuel Macron, who has repeatedly expressed his reluctance on the subject.

According to the socialist deputy Marie-Noëlle Battistel, 2,000 women are forced each year to go abroad to be able to have an abortion because they have exceeded the legal deadlines.

These are the "most vulnerable women, the very young, the furthest from the healthcare system, the women who have the least access to health information, those who have no means of transport or those who are victims of violence. ".

The bill also plans to extend the practice of instrumental abortion to midwives.

"More numerous than doctors in France, they can already perform abortions by medication since 2016," explains Albane Gaillot.

"A headlong rush" according to Pécresse

Initially, the text planned to remove the “specific conscience clause” allowing doctors to refuse to perform an abortion.

But this development has been scratched to allow the bill to advance in its parliamentary course.

The Minister of Health, personally in favor of extending the abortion period, had made it a prerequisite.

This extension of the duration of abortion is therefore one of the small pebbles sown at the end of the five-year term to give a more progressive orientation to the macronist balance sheet.

The bill bristles pro-life activists from the Vita Alliance and part of the right in the Senate and the National Assembly, which has given voice in the hemicycles and has tried parliamentary obstruction.

In an interview with

ELLE

magazine , the candidate LR Valérie Pécresse deplored with the delay at 14 weeks "a headlong rush which diverts the gaze from the real problem: access to the abortion center, the absence of gynecologists and wise men -women (…) the free choice of women must be guaranteed”.

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