Emmanuel Macron is playing a dangerous game with abortion rights in France
Photograph: Christophe Petit-Tesson/EPA
France needs babies. During a press conference on 16 January, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, pledged to tackle the scourge of infertility and offered enhanced parental “childbirth leave” as part of his “demographic rearmament” plan to revive the country’s declining birthrate.
While his goals may be commendable, Macron’s rhetoric sounds alarmingly close to that of authoritarian and rightwing populist leaders who have been aggressively pursuing pro-natalist policies in recent years. After all, Vladimir Putin recently urged Russian women to have “eight or more children” as he seeks to reverse the decades of population decline that have only been exacerbated by heavy casualties in Ukraine.
The centrist Macron is no Putin, and largely secular France may seem unlikely ground for anti-abortion sentiment to thrive, but the French government has been playing a dangerous double game on reproductive rights that could have troubling consequences.
French leaders made a pledge to enshrine abortion rights in the constitution after the US overturned Roe v Wade in June 2022, recognising that reproductive freedoms are fragile and at the mercy of a change in government. But Macron’s government has, so far, emboldened and legitimised the country’s anti-abortion movement by resorting to fearmongering around declining birthrates (in 2023, France still had the highest fertility rate in the EU), and directly engaging with anti-abortion organisations. Earlier this month, to the dismay of women’s rights campaigners, the health minister paid a visit to a leading anti-abortion organisation.
And French anti-abortion groups have become markedly bolder in the past 18 months. A new study by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) shows they have turned to social media and are using an ever-broadening range of tactics to dissuade women from seeking abortion care, reach new audiences and influence public opinion. They are aided by social media algorithms and the inadequate policies of platforms that largely fail to address abortion-related dis- and misinformation.
There has also been a marked increase in attacks on the offices of prominent French reproductive health organisations in recent months, along with widely publicised stunts such as the coordinated anti-abortion sticker campaign on rental bikes in Paris. “Anti-abortion groups glued the locks on our doors, preventing us from accessing our offices,” Sarah Durocher, president of Planning Familial, tells me. “Some women come to us in vulnerable situations. Imagine how they feel seeing graffiti on the side of the building comparing abortion to murder.”
Our research shows France’s anti-abortion groups have learned from transnational anti-abortion movements. They tie abortion to divisive “culture wars” issues, such as sex education in schools. They target young women and girls with paid-for ads containing graphic depictions of abortion (one anti-abortion campaign spent more than €40,000 on such ads on Meta in the year after the US supreme court decision, the ISD report found). They use deception, disguising themselves as pro-choice pages, spreading health misinformation about the procedure, cherrypicking data and encouraging mistrust of doctors.
They also play on public anxieties about declining birthrates and barely disguised anti-immigration sentiment, which far-right parties have long peddled in France. Online groups supporting the 2022 far-right presidential candidate Éric Zemmour were found to be the most active amplifiers of anti-abortion content. Zemmour gathered 7.07% of the vote in the first round of the presidential election while promoting the “great replacement theory”, an ideology steeped in racist fantasies of immigrant populations replacing white Christian ones, which has been weaponised to ban abortion in some US states.
The electoral gains made by far-right parties in France, which have defended curbing access to abortion to various degrees, combined with growing anti-abortion activism, is a warning sign of how the tide of progress can turn. Anti-abortion movements are playing a long game, seeking to gradually influence public discourse, shape policy and prevent women from making informed choices.
This week, the French parliament debated enshrining abortion rights in the constitution. If it were to go ahead, France could set a significant precedent for women’s and reproductive rights. But it will not deter anti-abortionists from their work. Days ago, the international anti-abortion “March for Life” took place, bringing together an estimated 6,000 people in Paris.
Across the world, rightwing populist leaders have been turning women’s bodies into objects at the service of the nation, slowly eroding women’s autonomy and curbing reproductive rights. Poland’s last government introduced a near-ban on abortion in January 2021. (Its prime minister, Donald Tusk, is attempting to ease restrictions, but his government faces an uphill battle.) Hungary passed a law that would force women to listen to their foetus’s heartbeat before having an abortion. In Argentina and Italy, the far-right governments in place have also vowed to curb women’s access to abortion.
Nearly 50 years after the legalisation of abortion in France, women’s rights may seem secure, yet online abortion groups are managing to spread and amplify their message more effectively than ever before. In the US, reproductive rights were demolished in many states overnight. In France and elsewhere, they could still be gradually dismantled, a reminder that, as Simone de Beauvoir said: “Those rights are never to be taken for granted; you must remain vigilant throughout your life.”
Cécile Simmons is an investigative researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), focusing on dis/misinformation, online subcultures, women’s rights and wellness