CNA Newsroom, Jan 31, 2024 / 11:45 am (CNA).
The French National Assembly on Tuesday voted to introduce a “right to abortion” in the French Constitution, less than two weeks after thousands of French citizens participated in the Paris March for Life.
The plan to write access to abortion into France’s constitution was announced by President Emmanuel Macron in October 2023 and reported by French media as a reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Shortly after the announcement, Archbishop Pierre d’Ornellas of Rennes, the French bishops’ bioethics spokesperson, raised serious concerns in an interview with Vatican News. He noted France would be “practically the only country in the world to have enshrined such a right in our constitution.”
The prelate warned: “What happens when abortion is enshrined in the constitution as a principle? Does this mean that the right to life becomes an exception?”
The archbishop said the abortion rate in France was already “twice as high as in Germany, and I don’t think that enshrining freedom of access to abortion in the constitution will eliminate the fact that it is ‘always a tragedy.’”
As many as 234,000 abortions were registered in France in 2022, 17,000 more than in 2021, and the highest in 30 years, according to official statistics.
The proposed change to the constitution would enshrine a “liberté garantie” — a “guaranteed freedom” — to abort an unborn child.
None of the major political parties in the French Parliament is questioning the “right” to abortion, and the bill received 493 votes for and 30 against.
The country decriminalized abortion on Jan. 17, 1975. Each year, the Paris March for Life is held on the third Sunday of January, remembering the legislation’s date.
This year, according to organizers, 15,000 French Catholics and pro-life activists took to the streets of Paris on Jan. 21 — less than two weeks before Tuesday’s vote in the French lower house.
The march’s organizers presented a list of proposals, including making it compulsory from the sixth week of pregnancy to have an ultrasound to hear the unborn’s heartbeat.
Following Tuesday’s vote in the National Assembly, the French Senate must agree to the exact same wording; that vote is scheduled for the end of February.
Pope Francis, who has repeatedly decried abortion, spoke about the right to life on the flight from the French city of Marseille to Rome on Sept. 23 of last year.
Responding to journalists about whether he addressed the issue of euthanasia with Macron — a practice also supported by the government, with a draft law legalizing assisted suicide expected in late February — the pope said: “Today we didn’t talk about this issue, but we talked about it during the other visit, when we met. I spoke clearly when he came to the Vatican; I told him my opinion, clearly: You don’t play with life, neither at the beginning nor at the end. You don’t play with it.”
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A constitutional guarantee to murder your prenatal infant is the final testament ending France as a Catholic nation. Restructuring of Notre Dame was simply restoring a museum, as are the countless beautiful spired French Gothic churches doting the landscape from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean.
Suave Macron, polished, progressive socialist leading the march to end a great nation. La République En Marche! His Republic on the March is considered center right, that tag understood in the most progressive, secularist terms. A kind of smooth nationalist secularism that reminds this writer of National Socialism [Nazism] without the hysteria.
If I may, I would open a window to an article by a non-Catholic – the Italian journalist Giuliano Ferrara – a very severe article, but one that I would have liked a Catholic to have written.
Overwhelming majority, just two dozen noes, the French National Assembly enshrines in the Constitution the guillotine for conceived but unborn children, abortion or voluntary termination of pregnancy. This would be the fulfillment of the revolutionary homeland of rights, under the aegis (and I’m sorry but it was predictable) of a president who dares not call himself liberal but would be so in economics and society, except for aligning with the most massive, overwhelming wave of gloomy and transversal conformism, no more political, ideological, or cultural distinctions, no discussion, it’s done because it can be done, it must be done because the body is mine, even that of another I have conceived with the decisive and shared, as it is now called, help of a male, under the now evanescent screen of pleasure and love. If in France, beyond the veil of intelligent chatter, a bit of the powerful and bitter moralism of the Grand Siècle, of the seventeenth century, had survived, the deputies of Palais Bourbon would have known that this tribute to the philosophy of so-called rights is only a blasphemous homage to self-love, in its serialized, massified, obligatory version.
La Rochefoucauld: ‘Self-love is the love of oneself and of everything for oneself; it makes men idolaters of themselves and would make them tyrants of others if fortune gave them the means; it never lingers outside of itself, and it dwells on extraneous subjects like bees on flowers, to draw from them what is necessary. Nothing is more impetuous than its desires, nothing is more secret than its plans, nothing is more cunning than its conduct; its subtleties cannot be described, its transformations surpass those of metamorphoses, its refinements those of chemistry. The depths cannot be fathomed nor the darkness of its abyss penetrated. There it is safe from the eyes most perspicacious; it performs a thousand vicious turns. Often it is invisible even to itself, conceives, nourishes, raises there, unknowingly, a large number of affections and hatreds; it forges ones so monstrous that, when they come to light, it disowns them or cannot bring itself to admit them.’
The idolatry of oneself, the irresponsible and complicit male, and the female who becomes a victim and executioner of her freedom, the Constitution that cuts off any possible conscientious objection, establishes indeed the obligation of conscience to kill future and survival, a metamorphosis of horror, a ruthless and cynical desire for gratification at the expense of life, impetuous, secret, cunning, subtle, chemical, laden with hatred, vicious, invisible even to itself: everything has already been written, only the constitutional sanction in the name of fraternity, equality, and of course, freedom was missing. What endless shame, what disgust, what condemnation to death of an entire sensitivity and culture, what a perverse champion of the ideal of secularism, what an irreligious delirium. And there will be no bishops and priests and holy beguines and intellectuals to barricade, neither people nor their elected nor parties will rise in the name of scientific obviousness, the banal photograph of a chromosomally pure and unique child destined for slaughter. The revolution of homicidal rights has triumphed, l’intendance suivra (the supply will follow).”
This is an immortal, spectacular, and courageous piece that delves deep and highlights what we hide. The author, as I mentioned, does not have faith in God, but I see faith in this article. I would like to add that France is a country notoriously dominated by Freemasonry (cf: https://oraetcogita.substack.com/p/part-two-a-new-study-on-freemasonry, and: https://oraetcogita.substack.com/p/a-new-study-on-freemasonry-how-does).
Just 430 years ago, on February 2nd, the cycle of apparitions of ‘Mary of Good Success’ began as the Holy Virgin appeared to Sister Mariana de Jesús, now a Servant of God, leaving us prophecies – many already fulfilled, others yet to come – about the Church and the present world.The Virgin Mary, appearing in Quito, Ecuador, to a cloistered nun, Mother Mariana Francisca de Jesús Torres y Berriochoa (1563-1635), prophesied the severe crisis that would afflict the Catholic Church and society from the mid-20th century onwards, condemning especially the satanic, destructive, and devastating work of the Masonic sect even before its formal establishment (June 24, 1717).
She said: “… Passions will overflow, and there will be a total corruption of morals, so that Satan will almost reign through the Masonic sects, mainly tending to corrupt children and thereby provoke general corruption. Woe to the children of that time! … The sect, after conquering all social classes, will attack the family and childhood. In those unfortunate times, we will hardly find the innocence of childhood; thus, vocations to the priesthood will be lost, and this will constitute a true calamity.”
However, in the last apparition, which occurred on December 8, 1634, the Queen of Heaven and Earth concluded with these words of hope, similar to those of Fatima: “… the veneration to me under the comforting title of Our Lady of Good Success, in the almost total corruption of the twentieth century, will work for the support and safeguarding of the faith.”