NEW YORK (C-Fam) The EU Parliament asked the EU Council to declare abortion a fundamental right in a resolution adopted today (Apr. 11) in Brussels.
The resolution, adopted with 336 votes in favor, 163 against, and 39 abstentions, cites the non-binding opinions of UN bodies to support its claims and urges EU member states to “decriminalize abortion in line with the 2022 WHO guidelines.” It condemns conscience protections for medical practitioners and institutions who refuse to perform abortions, and specifically, “calls on Poland and Malta to repeal their laws and other measures concerning bans and restrictions on abortion.”
Conservative members of the EU parliament called the non-binding resolution a political stunt because it is not binding on EU member states and its main purpose was to call for an amendment to the EU Charter of Fundamental Freedoms.
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The amendment proposed in the resolution declares that “Everyone has the right to bodily autonomy, to free, informed, full and universal access to sexual and reproductive health and rights, and to all related healthcare services without discrimination, including access to safe and legal abortion.”
For the amendment to be adopted into EU treaty law it would require all EU heads of government to agree on the amendment and then ratify it according to their own national constitutions. Achieving this is highly unlikely given the wide variety of abortion laws in Europe.
But the resolution isn’t completely harmless. It also contains specific directions to the EU Commission—the EU executive branch—to promote abortion and silence abortion foes.
It calls on the EU Commission to use “all available tools to ensure that organizations working against gender equality and women’s rights including reproductive rights do not receive EU funding.” It notes, in this regard, a “significant surge in funding for anti-gender and anti-choice groups.”
It calls on the Commission to proactively “ensure and politically support an enabling civic space” for abortion and homosexual/trans groups and to support them financially through the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV) program.
It also calls on EU diplomats to make abortion rights a “priority in negotiations within international institutions and in other multilateral forums such as the Council of Europe and the UN.”
Tweet This: The EU resolution isn’t harmless; it contains specific directions to the EU Commission to promote abortion and silence abortion foes.
Elisa Ferreira, a member of the powerful EU Commission—the executive branch of the European Union—assured the EU parliament that the draft resolution is consistent with the EU Commission’s own approach to abortion as part of sexual and reproductive health and rights, when the resolution was first introduced last month.
Ferreira said that while abortion policies were the competence of EU member states, “sexual and reproductive health rights are at the core of gender equality” and that “lack of access to safe and legal abortion can affect several fundamental rights, including human dignity and the right to equality and to the physical and mental integrity of the person.”
The EU Commission already promotes abortion, she implied, by promoting funding for civil society organizations working on gender equality, including sexual and reproductive health and rights through the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values programme and direct pressure on governments through the Mutual Learning Programme in Gender Equality and support to implement the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
The Conference of European Bishops earlier this week lamented the resolution, saying that abortion “can never be a fundamental right.”
“The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU cannot include rights that are not recognized by all and are divisive,” the Bishops said.
Editor's note: Stefano Gennarini writes for C-Fam. This article first appeared in the Friday Fax, an internet report published weekly by C-Fam (Center for Family & Human Rights), a New York and Washington DC-based research institute. This article appears with permission.
