On March 8, the droit à l’avortement, the “right to abortion,” was solemnly enshrined in our constitution.

France can thus take pride in being the first country in the world to have raised abortion to the level of a “fundamental freedom” and even an essential “republican principle” because, as several supporters of this revision have declared, the French Republic without abortion would no longer be the Republic. Nothing less.

This constitutional revision, championed by President Emmanuel Macron, was extremely easy. In France, opposition is virtually non-existent on the issue. Unlike, for example, the United States, where opposition to abortion has always been strong among the population and supported by major political forces, in France the possibility for women to have an abortion, since it was recognized by law in 1975, seems to have become as sacred and untouchable as the right to five weeks’ paid holiday. No political force above the level of insignificance opposes the “right to abortion” in France.

So the negative reactions have been purely formal: only the uselessness of this constitutional revision has been criticized. What’s the point of revising our constitution to enshrine a “right to abortion” when, in the foreseeable future, nothing, absolutely nothing, threatens this “right” in our dear old country? This is the position taken, for example, by Marine Le Pen, the president of the Rassemblement National, the country’s second-largest political force, which is supposed to be on the far right.

This objection may seem like common sense, but it is above all the mark of poor political intelligence, which will surprise no one coming from Ms. Le Pen.

Emmanuel Macron, conversely, has many flaws, and some serious ones, but he is not lacking in political intelligence: he knows what he is doing and he understands perfectly well what is at stake in enshrining abortion in the constitution. His political calculation in this matter is as transparent as it is cynical.

Since his first election in 2017, Macron’s political credo has been “neither right nor left.” The electoral coalition on which he relies might be called the extrême centre, a concept originated by the historian Pierre Serna. The extrême centre is defined above all by its vehement rejection of the “extremes,” a term used to characterize all those who do not share the political views of the centrists, views that are often described as libérales-libertaires: free-trade, multiculturalist, contemptuous of religion and tradition, permissive when it comes to morals, etc. (“Liberal-libertarian” would not be a good translation, as the term libéral has a very different meaning than its Anglo-Saxon cognate.) In short, the extrême centre is the party of elites who intend to defend their dominant position against “extremists” of all stripes, often also described, very revealingly, as “populists.”

Since his reelection in the spring of 2022, Emmanuel Macron’s position has become more precarious. The president’s political party no longer has a majority in the National Assembly, and, in order to pass its bills, the government is forced to put together ad hoc coalitions, sometimes gaining support from the left and sometimes from the right. What’s more, the party is itself divided between a “right” wing and a “left” wing, and its internal balance is fragile.

At the end of December, President Macron’s government narrowly succeeded in forcing through Parliament a law on immigration control. This bill, like the twenty-nine that have preceded it on the same subject since 1980, is fundamentally a lie: for a long time now, France’s migration policy has no longer been in the hands of the national legislature, but in those of the courts—in particular, the European courts (specifically, the Court of Justice of the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights), which prevent any effective control of migratory flows.

Its adoption will therefore change very little in a situation that has become dramatic, but its mere existence was enough to disturb deeply the Left, and the many Macronists among them, for whom any declared desire to control immigration (even if this desire is not followed by action) is ultimately a form of racism.

Emmanuel Macron therefore needed to pander to his left wing, and what better way to do that than to give himself a cheap feminist badge by enshrining the “right to abortion” in our constitution? In our latitudes, the famous “patriarchy” that feminists see everywhere at work to oppress women has been dead and buried for so long that its corpse has turned to dust. It is therefore an ideal adversary.

And the feminists who were pushing for the “right to abortion” to be enshrined in the constitution were not chasing a phantom, contrary to what their soft opponents would like to believe. In fact, what feminists are looking for is exactly what Southern U.S. states were looking for on the eve of the Civil War. To explain it, I can do no better than to quote Abraham Lincoln, in his Cooper Union Address. Noting that no compromise, no concession, no reassurance had been able to appease the slave-holding states of the South, which were more than ever threatening secession and vehemently denouncing the actions of the North, Lincoln asked the question: what then could convince the Southern states that those of the North had no intention of interfering with their “peculiar institution,” i.e., slavery?

And Lincoln answers:

This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly—done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated—we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas’s new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us . . ..

Demanding what they do, and for the reason they do, they can voluntarily stop nowhere short of this consummation. Holding, as they do, that slavery is morally right, and socially elevating, they cannot cease to demand a full national recognition of it, as a legal right, and a social blessing.

Replace “slavery” with “abortion,” and you have the perfect explanation of what French feminists are really asking for. They know perfectly well that no one in France is threatening the legality of abortion and that enshrining the “right to abortion” would have no effect on women’s access to abortion. But they don’t care, because what they really want, and the only thing that might satisfy them, is for abortion to be recognized publicly as a “social blessing,” and for “the whole atmosphere to be disinfected from all taint of opposition” to abortion.

In 1974, Simone Veil explained to the National Assembly that she had proposed a bill making abortion legal in order to “control it and, as far as possible, dissuade women from having it.” It was necessary, she said, to provide for a procedure that would enable women to “assess the full seriousness of the decision they are about to take.” She also explained that abortion should not be covered by social security in order to “underline the seriousness of an act that must remain exceptional”—to signal that society “tolerates abortion but can neither pay for it nor encourage it.” She also said, “I am careful not to believe that this is an individual matter concerning only the woman and that the nation is not involved.”

Even then, this position was extremely naive, or extremely dishonest. All you had to do was listen carefully to feminists and read their writings seriously, such as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), the holy writ of contemporary feminism, to understand that considering abortion to be a “serious act” that should remain exceptional was simply anathema. Indeed, feminist dogma asserts that abortion is the condition for women’s “liberation,” given that the primary cause of their enslavement to men is that they have to bear children.

Yet the “liberation” of women is an unmixed good, so the means of this liberation cannot be morally ambivalent. To assert that abortion is a “serious act” is to give a bad conscience to women who consider it, or at least to some of them, and consequently to dissuade even a tiny fraction of them from having recourse to it. Calling it a necessary evil is no different from saying that, for a woman, “freedom” has a cost that it may be legitimate not to want to pay. In sum, any moral reservation about abortion is tantamount to perpetuating the “domination” from which women suffer, or at the very least to delaying their “liberation.” This is unacceptable.

Abortion must therefore not only be legally possible but also publicly approved, and all those who have reservations about abortion must be prevented from expressing them. This is precisely what the constitutionalization of the “right to abortion” aims to achieve, because a right, and particularly a right protected by the constitution, is inseparably something legal and moral. To say that you have the “right” to do something is to assert not only that the law does not punish the action in question (which is a simple observation), but also that the action in question is good or, at worst, indifferent—in short, that you are not open to criticism when you make use of the freedom that the law gives you. It’s a moral claim.

And after the “freedom of women” protected by the constitution will come the “no freedom for the enemies of freedom,” because if abortion is incorporated into the constitution, it must be one of the foundations of our republican regime, as we have seen—and, consequently, questioning the legitimacy of abortion amounts, even implicitly, to questioning the Republic.

Now that abortion has been enshrined in the constitution, the next step will be to make criticism of abortion the equivalent of “incitement to hatred, violence, or discrimination,” which already exists in our penal code and makes it possible to criminalize a host of comments that, not so long ago, would have been considered part of normal civic conversation in a free regime. It shouldn’t be too difficult. Over the last thirty years or so, the noose has continued to tighten around the throats of those opposed to abortion.

Since 1993, there has been an offense of “obstructing abortion,” characterized by the disruption of access to establishments providing abortions or by the exertion of pressure, threats, etc., against medical staff or pregnant women coming in for an abortion. In 2004, the offense of obstruction was extended to include disrupting women’s access to information on abortion. Finally, in 2017, the offense of “digital obstruction” of abortion was introduced. This tort is characterized in particular by the dissemination of information “of such a nature as to intentionally mislead, with the aim of dissuading, about the characteristics or medical consequences of an abortion.” Offenders risk a fine of up to thirty thousand euros and two years’ imprisonment.

Its authors clearly intended this law to criminalize any comments aimed at dissuading women from having an abortion. Fortunately, the law that was finally adopted is not entirely in line with the original plan, and the Constitutional Council (the body responsible for verifying the constitutionality of laws in France) has further restricted its scope, in the name of the freedom of expression protected by the constitution.

But now that the “right to abortion” is enshrined in the constitution and has become a principle on the same level as freedom of expression, it will be possible to pass even more restrictive laws to silence finally those who continue to believe that abortion is a serious act that should only be authorized in exceptional circumstances.

It is also to be feared that enshrining the “right to abortion” in the constitution will put an end to the conscience clause, which, since the 1975 law, has allowed doctors to refuse to perform abortions if the act offends their personal (often religious) convictions. This conscience clause has always particularly irritated feminists, because it is obviously based on the idea that abortion is a morally dubious act that can legitimately be considered unacceptable, even if it is legal. So they have never stopped attacking it and trying to make it disappear—for the moment, without success. But now they can rightly believe that the day is drawing near when they will finally be able to remove this accursed conscience clause.

The stakes in this constitutional amendment were therefore very high indeed. What was at stake was not the fate of unborn children because, as far as they are concerned, and to repeat, there is no political player of any importance in France today who is prepared to speak on their behalf. What was at stake was what remained of the French people’s freedom of speech and freedom of conscience.

The apparent massive public support for this revision would seem to prove that the French are ready to give up on both for good.