While the ideological confrontation between those for and those against women’s abortion access has been brewing for decades, the rise of populist parties and movements has shone a new light on the issue. As both right and left populisms take shape, a new political frontier is building around women’s reproductive rights. The 2024 amendment of the French Constitution to include women’s guaranteed freedom to abortion illustrates one political outcome at the intersection of populism and constitutionalism.
“Nothing can ever be taken for granted. It takes only one political, economic or religious crisis for women’s rights to be called into question. You must remain vigilant throughout your life.”
With this now famous quote by French philosopher and writer Simone de Beauvoir, began a June 27, 2022 proposal by a French opposition party La France Insoumise or France Unbowed (LFI), a self-styled left populist movement, to amend the country’s Constitution. The proposed amendment sought to insert a clause that would, for the first time in its constitutional history, refer to women’s reproductive rights and, specifically, abortion. On March 8, 2024, France became the first country in the world to enshrine abortion freedom in its Constitution. The new amendment stated:
“The law determines the conditions by which is exercised the freedom of women to have recourse to an abortion, which is guaranteed.”
But, was such a proposal justified? Could reproductive rights be considered “constitutional material”? What was striking about this proposal was that there was no imminent threat to abortion access coming from France. Rather, what figured large in this call for constitutional reform was the recent US Supreme Court ruling that had struck down American women’s constitutional right to abortion. Just three days prior, on June 24, 2022, a majority opinion of the US Supreme Court – recently stacked by President Trump with three new justices well-known for their anti-abortion stances – had invalidated Roe v. Wade, a ruling dating back to 1973 that had legalized abortion for almost 50 years.
The fact that this American case was cited considerably in the French bid for constitutional reform begs the question: Do transatlantic politics and foreign legal and political developments justify modifications of national constitutions? For many French senators, the answer was No. One senator in particular protested: “This is not senatorial wisdom. We are reacting to an event that doesn’t concern us”, referring to the US decision. Qualified as “constitutional nationalism,” this line of thinking holds that only domestic matters warrant constitutional reforms. If abortion rights are not under threat in France, contrary to the United States, the constitutional amendment is nothing but a “political scheme”, a mere “symbol”, or a “performance”. And yet, feminist legal scholars argue that despite its symbolic function, constitutionalization of the abortion freedom achieves one crucial objective: it affirms the fundamental equality between men and women, and it is this equality that allows them to participate as equal citizens in the political community. If women are denied abortion access, they are denied bodily autonomy and are thereby reduced to instruments of reproduction.
As the constitutional amendment passed a series of procedural hurdles, the leader of La France Insoumise, Mathilde Panot, repeatedly addressed the women of the world – and not just French women – in her many public speeches in the National Assembly: “I want to dedicate this historic victory – that we are sending as a signal both to our country and to the world – to the women of the United States, to the women of Poland, to the women of Hungary whose right to abortion is today hindered.” Panot had good reason to name the three countries since their right-wing populist governments had moved quickly to restrict abortion access but also to join new initiatives such as the Geneva Consensus, in the case of the US and Hungary.
In order to avoid having a referendum on the proposed constitutional reform, La France Insoumise arranged for a handover of the initiative to the Macron government. Even though the Macron government faced the accusations of importing an American debate, it seized on this initiative with a remarkably high approval rate among French parliamentarians of most political stripes, as well as the general public.
On the International Women’s Day, March 8, 2024, President Macron delivered an emotional speech during a special public ceremony. His call for the protection of the abortion freedom infused left populist rhetoric of the fight against right-wing reactionary forces with French Republican, universalist values and a call for France to stand tall as the defender of all women universally: “Because today, in our Europe, nothing can be taken for granted and everything must be defended. Beyond Europe, we will fight for this right to become universal and effective, and we will lead this battle for all women.”
In a rare move for France and other modern democracies, the left populist movement and the Macron government amended the country’s Constitution by building a dichotomous political frontier between a “people-as-defenders-of-liberty” on the one hand, and on the other, the rising right-wing populist governments marked by intolerance towards the liberties of others. Even if the constitutional amendment invests France with no authority over women outside of France, it still aims to discursively elevate France to the status of the pioneering protector of women’s rights, and by extension, human rights, for all women everywhere.
And yet, just six weeks before his historic speech, Macron “pledged to tackle the scourge of infertility and offered enhanced parental ‘childbirth leave’ as part of his ‘demographic rearmament’ plan to revive the country’s declining birthrate.” He was fiercely criticized by feminist groups for playing into the right-wing fearmongering around declining birth rates, such as the “great replacement theory.” Moreover, a few weeks prior, the French health minister paid a visit to a leading anti-abortion organization, the Institut Jérôme-Lejeune. Such political moves send a mixed message, but importantly they contribute to policy mitigation, softening the blow of the more controversial policies, and in this case the constitutional reform for abortion, among that segment of the electorate that opposes them.
Ultimately, the objective of the constitutional amendment was to empower the legislator to determine under which conditions women can resort to abortion, making it difficult for the legislator to ever ban the procedure or restrict the conditions in such a way as to infringe upon the guaranteed freedom. Decidedly, the French case of constitutional reform marks a new turn in the fight for reproductive rights and signals a new positioning of the political frontier: the ideological front, more or less global, between the populist right and the populist left now sits squarely on women’s reproductive rights.
This blog is the second in a 3 part series related to an event held on April 9, 2025 titled “Left Populist Movements and Women’s Reproductive Rights: A Comparative View of Recent Abortion Law Reforms“. Read the first blog by Seána Glennon here.
