On Wednesday 17 December, the European Parliament will vote on the European citizens’ initiative ‘My Voice, My Choice’, which has 1.2 million signatures calling on the European Union to take action to ensure access to safe and legal abortion.
The MEPs will vote on five alternative draft resolutions, the order of which will be important, as the adoption of one text will lead to the fall of the others.
Adopted on 8 December by the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM) (https://aeur.eu/f/jbi ), the draft motion for a resolution tabled by Abir Al-Sahlani (Renew Europe, Swedish) supports the initiative and calls on the European Commission to propose a voluntary solidarity mechanism for European financial support, in compliance with Member States’ national law, for the care of women from countries where access to abortion is restricted.
The alternative draft resolution tabled by some forty EPP and ECR MEPs, which will be examined first, argues that the EU has no competence to fund access to abortion and calls on the Commission to take no further action on the initiative.
The EPP Group’s coordinator on the FEMM committee, Eleonora Meleti (Greek), told Agence Europe that the text had not been tabled on behalf of the group and that she did not support it.
Three other texts, presented by the ESN, PfE and ECR Groups, also contest any European action in this area, invoking the EU’s lack of competence, and support the “protection of life”, putting forward demographic considerations.
The ECR coordinator, Laurence Trochu (French), defends a strictly legal interpretation, believing that the initiative presents legal weaknesses by seeking to link abortion to European public health to the detriment of the principle of subsidiarity.
For Abir Al-Sahlani, these subsidiarity arguments are questionable and are being used as a political pretext, since the Commission has already acknowledged that the initiative falls within the EU’s remit for cross-border healthcare. She goes on to cite similar financial mechanisms, notably as part of the EU4Health programme.
French Green MEP Mélissa Camara denounces alternative resolutions based, in her view, on false legal arguments and driven by a retrograde ideology opposed to women’s rights.
The Chair of the S&D Group, Iratxe García Pérez, who supports the initiative, believes that the democratic credibility of the EU is at stake.
Draft resolutions, in order of voting: https://aeur.eu/f/k0t (EPP-ECR); https://aeur.eu/f/k0u (FEMM); https://aeur.eu/f/k0v (ESN); https://aeur.eu/f/k0w (PfE); https://aeur.eu/f/k0x (ECR) (Original version in French by Nithya Paquiry)