(LifeSiteNews) — In the wake of France’s vote to enshrine abortion as constitutional right, we are facing the largest pan-European assault on the right to life of children in the womb in a generation.
As birth rates plunge and Europe faces multiple simultaneous crises, there is something grotesquely fitting about a crusade for abortion occurring at this moment. Progressives pushing abortion as a human right believe they are standing for human rights and liberal democracy; their declarations sound more like a death rattle.
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In Spain, the leftist Sumar party, junior partner in Pedro Sánchez’s socialist-led (PSOE) coalition government, announced that they wish to follow France in enshrining feticide in the constitution. “France and its women have shown that progress is possible and necessary,” Labour Minister Yolanda Díaz wrote on X recently. “It is time to fully guarantee the rights of all women.” Sumar spokeswoman Aina Vidal concurred, stating that it is time to “move forward” on abortion and that they “invite all political parties with whom we have already discussed the issue to open this social debate.”
Spain has already moved dramatically on this issue over the past several years. Until 2010, it was illegal to procure an abortion except in cases of rape, fetal deformation, or a “serious physical or psychological risk to the mother”; even those instances were only decriminalized in 1985. In 2010, abortion on demand throughout the first 14 weeks of pregnancy was legalized; in 2022, Spain’s leftist government criminalized pro-life speech under the guise of stopping “harassment” of women seeking abortions.
Many doctors in Spain still resolutely refuse to provide abortions.
It isn’t just Spain. Earlier this month, abortion activists launched a new movement called “My Voice, My Choice” in Slovenia, with activists from Spain and France but also Finland, Poland, Croatia, and Ireland. “We are organizing at the European level to push the abortion issue forward,” Marta Lempart of the abortion group Polish Women’s Strike stated. “We will collect signatures to have member states opting into a programme that will provide them with financing when they provide abortions and reproductive care to residents from other member states.”
Abortion activists in Europe see the fall of Roe v. Wade as an opportunity to achieve their long-desired goal of enshrining abortion in the constitutions of nations across the continent as well as in the EU’s Charter of Human Rights. With a new and increasingly totalitarian leftist government in Poland willing to legalize abortion to the greatest extent, and a recent push to legalize abortion Malta having failed after a successful two-year campaign by the Maltese pro-life movement, activism is ramping up.
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Indeed, abortion activist Alexia Fafara of the Brussels-based European Women’s Lobby recently stated in an interview that the elimination of Europe’s remaining abortion restrictions is possible if only politicians are willing to exercise the “political will” to take the necessary steps.
“Countries where abortion is not easily accessible are Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia,” she stated. “And then in Malta and Poland, abortion is de facto impossible. I insist on the fact that to date, abortion rights are really a matter of political will. The situations in Poland and France clearly prove this.” The upcoming European elections, Fafara admitted, could pose an impediment to the collective abortion push, with conservative-leaning parties expected to make significant inroads.
“We are carefully monitoring the trends for the upcoming elections,” she noted. “Of course, we keep pushing our key messages, one of which is free, safe, legal, and destigmatised access to abortion and reproductive services. Reproductive justice is an integral part of a feminist Europe, and essential in order to guarantee women and girls to live free from violence and oppression.” It is “worrying to see this conservative wave approaching,” she said, but Poland is evidence that change is possible even in conservative countries.
It is a potent reminder that much hangs in the balance in the upcoming EU elections – migration, farmer’s issues, the “green agenda,” and also, I would argue most importantly, the fate of children in the womb in the last European countries where laws still protect them.
