Abortion Debate Resurfaces at EU

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BRUSSELS, October 31 (C-Fam) European abortion advocates have gathered more than one million signatures asking the European Union to pay for travel abortions. The idea is that the EU would pay for a Polish woman, for instance, to travel to France for a late-term abortion.

Nika Kovač, the representative of the “My Voice, My Choice” petition drive, said, “women from Poland have a good network of NGOs which are supporting their travels and medical procedures [for abortion]. But those medical procedures are costly, so what we want to do is to establish a way that NGOs or women themselves do not need to pay for them.”

Pro-life NGOs and members of the EU parliament came together in the European Parliament to object. “We are here today for a fight, a fight that is eminently political […] it is a fight for life,” said Laurence Trochu, French politician and member of the European Parliament.

The European Center for Law and Justice organized a response in the European Parliament. The conference, co-hosted by the One of Us Federation, the European People’s Party, and the European Conservatives and Reformists, the two main conservative parties in the EU Parliament, was the largest gathering of pro-life advocates in the EU Parliament in more than a decade.

“This petition is completely out of step with the reality of abortion,” said Nicolas Bauer, Senior Research Fellow at the ECLJ. Bauer warned against speaking of abortion “as a trivial choice” and said that the “‘My Voice My Choice’ [campaign] is a denial of women’s suffering” and a “denial of the unborn child, who is the most innocent being there is.”

Six women testified to their emotional and psychological wounds inflicted by abortion. One French woman described her abortion as “not chosen but endured.” She described the pressure she felt from the father of her baby and the medical establishment to undergo the abortion. ​She sought advice from several doctors but didn’t find a single “neutral third party.” Instead, they downplayed her concerns and accelerated the abortion process. She recalled lying on the floor crying when the baby’s father put the pill in her mouth that was supposed to “help the baby come out.”

Bauer said the European Union, through its “support and coordination powers,” could do more to “support motherhood and the family” in line with Article 33 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which states that “[t]he protection of the family is ensured on the legal, economic and social level.”

Bauer noted one successful EU program that supported one hundred poor and isolated Italian families who were “overwhelmed by the demands of welcoming and raising children” but flagged that its funding was “modest” and “discontinued four years ago” and that “[s]ince then, nothing has been done at the European level to support motherhood and the family.”

“The European Union is responsible for supporting motherhood and family life, and this morning we are asking it to make this a priority,” Bauer continued

The petition is part of an EU program called the European Citizens’ Initiative, which allows one million or more EU citizens to direct the European institutions to take up a particular issue. It should be noted that pro-lifers tried this years ago with something called One of Us. Though they gathered more than 1 million signatures, the European institutions ignored the request.  The EU has yet to respond to the petition by pro-abortion groups.

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