The abortion debate is heating up in Europe with calls coming from various points on the continent to enshrine abortion access as a right and loosen longstanding restrictions. In April, the European Union’s Parliament approved a resolution to add access to abortion to the E.U.’s Charter of Fundamental Rights.
The resolution calls for adding “access to safe and legal abortion” to the European Union’s human rights charter as part of “the right to bodily autonomy, to free, informed, full and universal access to sexual and reproductive health and rights.” However, the parliamentary resolution is non-binding. Only a unanimous vote from the heads of the E.U.’s 27 member states, not easy to achieve, can revise E.U. treaties, including the human rights charter.
Regulating abortion access has generally been considered outside the scope of the E.U.’s mandate, according to pro-life advocates. But the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in June 2022, overturning the Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion in 1973, has provoked supporters of abortion access in Europe to press for liberalization of abortion laws across the continent.
Shortly after the Dobbs ruling was made public, the European Parliament passed a resolution condemning the decision, launching the campaign to include the right to abortion in the E.U. charter. Adding access to abortion to the human rights treaty would give E.U. institutions leverage to pressure member states regarding their internal abortion laws.
The parliamentary resolution on abortion comes just a month after French politicians made history by declaring access to abortion a constitutional right. French President Emmanuel Macron has also supported adding abortion rights to the E.U. human rights treaty.
The question now is how other E.U. bodies, like the governing E.U. Commission, will respond to the parliament’s proposal.
“If the commission continues in the political and ideological line that it currently has, I’m sure it will present a proposal [regarding abortion] and it could also happen that there’s a treaty change,” said Margarita de la Pisa Carrión, a member of the European Parliament with the European Conservatives and Reformists Group. “This is why the upcoming European elections are important.”
Ana del Pino, executive director of the One of Us Federation, a pan-European pro-life organization, emphasizes that the parliamentary resolution is merely a political statement.
“It’s my personal opinion that abortion advocates in Parliament chose to bring forward this resolution at the end of the legislative period because they are afraid they will lose the left-leaning majority [in the E.U. Parliament] in the upcoming elections. They want to leave the resolution as a kind of road map or statement to the next commission,” she told America.
Elections to the European Parliament will take place in early June, and political analysts are predicting a shift to the political right. That shift will affect the composition of the incoming E.U. Commission.
Ahead of the June vote, the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Union issued a statement declaring that “abortion can never be a fundamental right,” adding, “The promotion of women and their rights is not related to the promotion of abortion.”
“We work for a Europe where women can live their maternity freely and as a gift for them and for society and where being a mother is in no way a limitation for personal, social and professional life,” the bishops said. “Promoting and facilitating abortion goes in the opposite direction to the real promotion of women and their rights.”
They bishops added that the E.U. “cannot impose on others, inside and outside its borders, ideological positions on the human person, sexuality and gender, marriage and family, etc.”
Abortion is legal up to 10 or 14 weeks of pregnancy in all E.U. member states except for Malta, where it is completely prohibited. Responding to moves to expand abortion access, the pro-life movement in Europe has become more active and has experienced higher numbers of supporters participating in now-annual pro-life marches in many countries. At times, the political back-and-forth on abortion in Europe, and subsequent popular protests for one side or the other, have come to mirror the U.S. culture war over abortion.
Protests in Poland
In 2020, the pro-life movement in Poland celebrated a victory when the country’s constitutional court prohibited abortion in cases of fetal abnormalities, the most commonly used justification for abortion. Now in a reversal Poland appears poised to liberalize its abortion law.
A liberal coalition government came into power following elections last year, and now four abortion bills are making their way through the Polish parliament. The Associated Press reports that one of the four proposals would decriminalize assisting a woman to have an abortion.
Another one, put forward by the Third Way coalition, would maintain a ban on abortion in most cases but would allow abortions in cases of fetal “defects”—effectively a return to the longstanding post-communist-era compromise the court had upended. The two other proposals would permit abortion through the 12th week of pregnancy—in line with current limits in other European states.
It is unlikely that any of the proposals would become law immediately even if Parliament approved them. Conservative President Andrezj Duda remains in power for one more year and is expected to veto bills that would expand abortion access in Poland.
Poles have responded to each major legal move regarding abortion by peacefully taking to the streets, whether deploring more abortion access or demonstrating for them. On April 14, following the first parliamentary debate on abortion, pro-lifers filled downtown Warsaw in a march against the proposed legislation. Polish bishops also called for that Sunday to be a day of prayer “in defense of the unborn.”
A contentious debate in Germany
Germany, too, may change its decades-old abortion policy. In Germany and Austria, abortion is still technically a criminal act, but prosecution and punishment are suspended when a woman seeks an abortion within the first 90 days of pregnancy. Now the progressive governing coalition of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats, the Greens and the pro-business Free Democrats are moving to change the policy.
The government tasked an independent commission a year ago with evaluating German abortion law. Last week, the commission returned with a report that recommends removing abortion from criminal law, legalizing abortion on demand up to the 12th week of pregnancy and allowing abortion up to the 22nd week under certain conditions still to be determined by legislators. Late-stage elective abortion would continue to be illegal.
“The earlier in the pregnancy, the more likely an abortion is permissible; and the more advanced the gestational age, the more important the needs of the unborn child are,” the commission members said in a summary of their report, according to The Associated Press.
The German bishops’ conference expressed deep concern about the report and its proposed changes to German law. Bishop Georg Bätzing, president of the conference, said in a statement: “In view of the fundamental questions raised by the recommendations that affect the foundations of our society, we believe that an intensive, fundamental examination of the commission report from an ethical and legal perspective is absolutely necessary. We consider the results of the redesign of abortion to be too one-sided. The current legal situation protects both the self-determination and health of the woman as well as the unborn child.”
Despite the bishops’ resistance, the German government has signaled that its plans to legalize abortion are not up for discussion. German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach said the government would carefully consider the findings and recommendations in the report and present it to the national parliament but that he did not want it to spark a heated, “ideologized” civic debate on abortion that would divide German society. In other words, his government will push through legislation to decriminalize abortion and the only matters to discuss are the details of its legalization, not the ethical or legal legitimacy of such policies.
Nevertheless, the quick public response to the report suggests that the same issues that have always surrounded the question of legalized abortion—the right to life of the unborn versus a woman’s personal autonomy—are on the minds of Germans. As one social commentator wrote, “The commission’s experts are not creating any new social divides. They uncover old ones that had been hidden for a long time because of a lazy compromise.”
Germany may have had a law on the books outlawing abortion, but in practice abortion within the first trimester has been widely accepted in German society. Abortion is considered illegal in Germany but not punishable if a woman undergoes mandatory counseling and observes a three-day wait period before she has the procedure.
The status quo offered concessions to both proponents and opponents of legalized abortion that had kept the contentious issue for the most part out of German politics and public debate. That time may be coming to an end.
Indeed, shortly after the release of the report, high-profile medical professionals and legal experts expressed opposition to the commission’s recommendations in an article for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany’s largest newspapers. The three authors—Klaus Reinhard, president of the German Medical Association; Jochen Sautermeister, a Catholic moral theologian; and Gregor Thüsing, a labor lawyer—criticized the commission for only granting a basic right to life by gestational stages while giving priority to the self-determination of the mother.
The authors charged that under the commission’s proposal the unborn child does not have full legal personhood until birth, a significant shift from boundaries previously established by the German judiciary, constitution and medical ethics.
Meloni’s agenda in Italy
In Italy, the trend of abortion liberalization in Europe has collided with the agenda of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Ms. Meloni has prioritized encouraging Italian women to have babies to reverse Italy’s demographic crisis. The premier, who campaigned on a slogan of “God, fatherland and family,” has insisted she will not roll back a 1978 law legalizing abortion in Italy but merely wants to implement it fully.
Her far-right government scored a victory on April 23 when the Italian Senate approved a law allowing anti-abortion groups access to women who are considering ending their pregnancies at public counseling centers that were created by the 1978 law. The development revives tensions around the issue of abortion in Italy, 46 years after it was legalized. Its supporters say the amendment merely fulfills the original intent of Italy’s abortion law, which included provisions to discourage the procedure and support motherhood.
Ms. Meloni’s political opponents maintain the amendment is an effort to chip away at abortion rights exactly as they had warned would follow Ms. Meloni’s election in 2022.
With reporting from The Associated Press.
