Denmark permits abortion up to the 18th week. File

Denmark’s government said May 3 it is relaxing its restrictions on abortion for the first time in 50 years to make it legal for women to terminate pregnancies up to the 18th week from the previous 12th week.

Officials said the law will also be changed to allow girls between 15 and 17 years old to have an abortion without parental consent.

Marie Bjerre, the gender equality minister, said Denmark is strengthening women’s rights while they are being rolled back in other parts of the world.

“It is about the individual woman’s freedom, about the right to decide over her own body and her own life. It is a historic day for women’s equality,” she said.

Free abortion was introduced in Denmark in 1973. The limit was set at up to 12 weeks because “at that time all abortions were performed surgically, and at that time an abortion after the 12th week entailed a greater risk of complications,” the health ministry said.

“After 50 years, it is time for the abortion rules to keep up with the times,” Health Minister Sophie Løhde said.

She said neighbouring Sweden, which set the legal limit at 18 weeks of gestation in 1996, has not experienced a significant increase in the number of abortions or when they are carried out.

The three-party centre government agreed on the move with two left-leaning groups, the Socialist People’s Party and the Red-Green Alliance, and two centre parties, the Social Liberals and the Alternative. The deal is to be sealed by a vote in parliament. No date for that was announced, but it is all but certain to pass because the government has a majority.

The change is expected to enter into force on June 1, 2025.

The health ministry said the legal age of consent in Denmark is 15, and a 15-year-old girl can make her own choices about her own body.

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Ms. Bjerre said that she hoped that “young women can find support from their parents. But if there is disagreement, it must ultimately be the young woman’s own decision whether she wants to be a mother. It is her body and her life.” Lawmaker Mette Thiesen, from a populist, anti-immigration party that was not part of the deal, called it ”a terrible day. It’s a terrible new law.” There is a “very fine balance between the woman’s right to her own body, but also the right to life of the little life that lies in the mother’s womb,” she told Danish broadcaster DR. “In week 18, we are talking about a small person with fingers and toes, which you can feel inside the womb.” Figures from the Danish Health Data Authority show that the total number of abortions in Denmark has been stable in recent years. In 2022 there were 14,700 medical abortions, compared to 14,500 in 2017. It peaked in 1975 when 27,900 abortions were performed.

While abortion is a deeply divisive issue in the United States, it is broadly legal across Europe.

France inscribed the guaranteed right to abortion in its constitution in a world first this year, sending a powerful message of support to women around the globe. Meanwhile, Poland’s parliament held a long-awaited debate on liberalising the country’s restrictive law last month — although many women terminate pregnancies at home with pills mailed from abroad.

In Germany, which has a more restrictive approach than many other European countries, an independent commission reviewing abortion law recently recommended that the procedure be made legal during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.

Versailles:

France on Monday enshrined the right to abortion in its constitution, a world first welcomed by women’s rights groups as historic and harshly criticised by anti-abortion groups.

MPs and senators overwhelmingly backed the move, by 780 votes against 72, in a special joint vote of the two houses of parliament, under the gilded ceilings of Versailles Palace, just outside Paris.

Abortion rights activists gathered in central Paris cheered and applauded as the Eiffel Tower scintillated in the background and displayed the message “MyBodyMyChoice” as the result of the vote was announced on a giant screen.

Abortion rights are more widely accepted in France than in the United States and many other countries, with polls showing around 80% of French people back the fact that abortion is legal.

“We’re sending a message to all women: your body belongs to you and no one can decide for you,” Prime Minister Gabriel Attal told lawmakers ahead of the vote.

Women have had a legal right to abortion in France since a 1974 law – which many harshly criticised at the time.

But the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to reverse the Roe v. Wade ruling that recognised women’s constitutional right to abortion prompted activists to push France to become the first country to explicitly protect the right in its basic law.

“This right (to abortion) has retreated in the United States. And so nothing authorised us to think that France was exempt from this risk,” said Laura Slimani, from the Fondation des Femmes rights group.

“There’s a lot of emotion, as a feminist activist, also as a woman,” Slimani said.

Monday’s vote enshrined in Article 34 of the French constitution that “the law determines the conditions in which a woman has the guaranteed freedom to have recourse to an abortion”.

“France is at the forefront,” said the head of the lower house of parliament, Yael Braun-Pivet, from French President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist party.

Abortion Rights

But the move was not exempt from criticism.

Far-right leader Marine Le Pen said Macron was using it to score political points, because of the large support for the right to abortion in the country.

“We will vote to include it in the Constitution because we have no problem with that,” Le Pen told reporters ahead of the Versailles vote, while adding that it was an exaggeration to call it a historic step because, she said, “no one is putting the right to abortion at risk in France”.

Pascale Moriniere, the president of the Association of Catholic Families, called the move a defeat for anti-abortion campaigners.

“It’s (also) a defeat for women,” she said, “and, of course, for all the children who cannot see the day.”

Moriniere said there was no need to add the right to abortion to the constitution.

“We imported a debate that is not French, since the United States was first to remove that from law with the repeal of Roe v. Wade,” she said. “There was an effect of panic from feminist movements, which wished to engrave this on the marble of the constitution.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Pro-abortion rights activists hold banner reads ‘abortion is a fundamental right’ during a rally for abortion rights outside La Sorbonne university in Paris, Wednesday Feb. 28, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP

France’s Senate backed a government move to enshrine the “freedom” to have an abortion in the constitution which will now be voted on at a special congress.

President Emmanuel Macron last year pledged to put the right to terminate a pregnancy – which has been legal in France since 1974 – into the constitution after the US Supreme Court in 2022 overturned the half-century-old right to the procedure, allowing states to ban or curtail abortion.

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Despite opposition from some conservative members, the upper chamber voted by 267 votes to 50 to back the constitutional change.

The lower-house National Assembly overwhelmingly voted in favour of making abortion a “guaranteed freedom” in January, with almost all members of Mr. Macron’s centrist minority coalition as well as left-wing opposition parties approving it.

Mr. Macron said he would call a special Congress session of the two chambers at Versailles palace on March 4 for a final vote. Mr. Macron welcomed what he called a “decisive step” by the Senate in his announcement on X.

Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti said France was on the verge of a “historic day” when it becomes “the first country in the world to protect in its constitution the freedom of women” to decide what happens to their bodies.

The plan faced some opposition from right-wing senators and the government chose the expression “guaranteed freedom” as an apparent compromise between both houses.

The lower house in 2022 had approved enshrining the “right” to an abortion, while the Senate last year was in favour of adding the “freedom” to resort to the procedure.

However before the full vote, a Senate committee on Wednesday rejected motions from the right to amend the text of the proposed revision.

In private several right-wing senators said they felt under pressure to approve the change.

“If I vote against it, my daughters will no longer come for Christmas,” said one woman senator who asked to remain anonymous.

A survey by French polling company IFOP in November 2022 found 86% of French people supported making abortion a constitutional right.