One year ago, France guaranteed the freedom to end a pregnancy in its constitution. Americans then reelected the man who set up the overturn of Roe v. Wade. Does the role of religion in politics explain the split?
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Amid the grandeur of the Versailles Palace, French lawmakers rose to their feet again and again in applause. In Trocadéro Square, beneath the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, hundreds cheered and waved flags in front of a live broadcast of the assembly session.
Such was the scene in Paris last March when France made history by guaranteeing the freedom to end a pregnancy in its constitution by a whopping 780-72 vote across party lines.
At the time, French leaders did not mince words: The move was, in part, a response to the US Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
“Our vote is also a promise to all women around the world who are fighting for the right to have control over their bodies,” French National Assembly Member Mathilde Panot proclaimed in a speech from the dais. “Like an echo, today’s vote tells them that their fight is ours and that this victory is theirs.”
Three years after Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the US Constitution “does not confer a right to abortion” in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe, France became the first country in the world whose constitution does.
Abortion aside, French and American right-wing platforms have increasingly converged. From promulgating portraits of a nation “flooded” by immigration to railing against “wokism” on college campuses, French far-right talking points ring familiar bells for anyone also tuned into contemporary Republican rhetoric.
But, as last year’s vote made clear, the right wings diverge on abortion.
While the revocation of reproductive rights has taken a backseat to Trump 2.0’s fresh flurry of activity in today’s news cycle, laws banning or restricting abortions earlier in pregnancies than would have been allowable under Roe’s standards have come into effect in 19 states.
And a 2024 Texas lawsuit taking aim at the ability of telemedicine doctors to prescribe abortion pills across state lines seems likely to land before the most conservative Supreme Court America has had since 1931.
For Marie Mercat-Bruns, a French American law professor at Sciences Po and the Lise CNRS Laboratory in Paris, the Franco-American parting of ways on abortion points to the foregrounding of religion in US politics.
“France is a secular country,” she said, adding that while laïcité — the French principle of secularism — is often deployed in debates on Islam (and specifically, against women who abide by an Islamic dress code), it restrains any group’s ability to push an overt religious agenda.
‘We Have Had Abortions’
Abortion rights movements in France and the US both found their legal footing in the early 1970s as second-wave feminism swept across the Atlantic, with movement leaders in both countries taking inspiration from each other.
In 1971, 343 of the most influential women in France signed a letter penned by celebrity author-philosopher Simone de Beauvoir stating that they had had abortions.
“One million women have abortions each year in France,” the Manifesto of the 343, as it became known, stated. “Condemned to secrecy, they do so in dangerous conditions while, under medical supervision, this is one of the simplest procedures.”
In those days, wealthier French women traveled to clinics abroad while others were condemned to seek the procedure locally through illegal providers, also known as faiseuses d’anges (“angel makers”).
“I declare that I am one of them,” the Manifesto continued. “I declare that I have had an abortion.”
Fifty-three well-known US women followed suit the next year, publishing a petition for legalization titled “We have had abortions” in the feminist Ms. magazine.
A Different Basis
But the way that the right to terminate a pregnancy was written into each country’s law marked a crucial divergence in the movements.
Abortion’s landmark legal moment in France came in 1970, when 16-year-old Marie-Claire Chevalier sought an illegal abortion with the aid of her mother and other women after she was impregnated by her rapist.
When her rapist was arrested on unrelated charges, he informed on Chevalier. She was charged, along with her mother and three other women who had helped her; all were arrested and were imprisoned awaiting trial.
Her case was taken up by famed lawyer Gisèle Halimi (a French women’s rights figure of similar stature to Ruth Bader Ginsberg in the US), tried in the working class Parisian suburb of Bobigny, and widely-publicized — featuring celebrities such as de Beauvoir, whose testimony made the male judges “drop their gaze like little boys,” according to Agence France-Presse.
Halimi focused the case on income disparity, asking the court if it had ever tried “the wife of a high-ranking official, of a famous doctor, or of a corporate executive?” and answering for it: “No.”
“You always try the same women, the Madame Chevaliers,” Halimi argued.
Together, the Bobigny Trial and the Manifesto of the 343 successfully framed abortion in France in a context of justice for women of lesser means by fostering a public understanding that “rich women were having abortions and not getting in trouble,” and would continue to, according to Kelly Colvin, a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
The solidarity-oriented grounding that the economic justice argument provided abortion in France aligned well with the French mindset and motto — “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” — as Mercat-Bruns pointed out.
Abortion in France was legalized with the 1975 Veil Act, styled after then-Health Minister Simone Veil, whose argument for decriminalization was similarly couched in equality; her case focused on the risks, physical and legal, illegality imposed specifically on poor women.
When Roe v. Wade struck down state abortion bans across America in 1973, the novel legal argument — an abortion-seeker’s right to privacy — was less connected to the national motto: “In God We Trust.” Many, especially on the Right, came to regard even its constitutional grounding as dubious.
In 1985, before she joined the Supreme Court, Ginsberg argued that Roe was weakened by the absence of a gender equality perspective.
“I expect … that organized and determined opposing efforts to inform and persuade the public on the abortion issue will continue,” she wrote.
Secularism vs. Schlafly
When Raimundo Rojas was in college in Florida in the late 1980s, he attended a campus debate on abortion for extra credit.
On one side was Sarah Weddington, an attorney who had represented “Jane Roe” in Roe v. Wade, and on the other was Phyllis Schlafly, a pro-life activist dubbed the “the first lady of the conservative movement” in the Reagan years.
During the debate, volunteers with a National Right to Life chapter handed out leaflets.
“They had pictures of babies who had been subjected to late [term] abortion,” Rojas said. “It stayed with me.”
He has been working with National Right to Life, self-identified as America’s oldest and largest pro-life organization, for 34 years now.
While Rojas said that his commitment to the movement is not motivated by faith, Schlafly’s part in his story provides a window into how the grassroots mobilization of religious groups has altered the fabric of US politics over the last half-century — bringing issues of sex and gender to the fore.
Throughout the 1970s, Schlafly led a coalition of Catholic, evangelical, and Mormon women, many of whom had never been politically active, against the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) — which would have prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex — and spoke out against Roe v. Wade.
“Before the religious Right got involved in politics, Republicans were on board with a lot of what was going on,” Colvin said. “Feminists could lobby either party.”
Before Schlafly’s war on women’s lib, 68 percent of Republicans (compared to only 59 percent of Democrats, a party with larger Catholic constituencies pre-Schlafly) agreed that abortion should be an issue between a woman and her doctor, and the ERA — first supported by the Republican Party — was all but written into the Constitution.
“ERA means abortion funding, means homosexual privileges, means whatever else,” Schlafly said in 1999, efficiently packaging the issues of gender and sexuality she used to kill the amendment’s ratification while catapulting religious conservatism to the mainstream.
Today, the Constitution remains ERA-less, and the 2016 Republican Party platform stated that “the unborn child has a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed” — using the word “abortion” 35 times.
The 2024 GOP platform, however, used “abortion” only once — “We will oppose Late Term Abortion” — mirroring Donald Trump’s own turn away from a pro-life stance at the federal level.
“Republicans are pro-life. Sadly, this Republican Platform is not,” the Eagle Forum, a nonprofit Schlafly founded, stated in a press release.
The Eagle Forum’s own platform today opposes same-sex marriage, taxpayer-financed parental leave, daycare and pre-kindergarden programs, and public schools “undermining parents on moral issues.” It supports making English the official national language.
“The politicization of the religious Right has been a hugely powerful force,” said Colvin, adding that religious groups “really stayed away” until issues of gender and sexuality were on the table.
Faithfully, Trump
Schlafly’s final book, The Conservative Case for Trump, was published a day after her death in 2016.
In it, she argued that those worried by “attacks on religious freedom” in America should lend then-candidate Trump their support.
Iconic Civil Rights Opponent Phyllis Schlafly Dies at 92 https://t.co/JuanCTpVuu #p2 #DEM #GOP #lgbt pic.twitter.com/qrZ6kCKM9o
— David Badash (@davidbadash) September 6, 2016
And the white religious Right — the interfaith voting bloc that Schlafly is partially credited with forging — showed up. Some 81 percent of evangelicals, 61 percent of Mormons, and 60 percent of white Catholics who voted in 2016 cast their ballots for Trump, aiding in a victory that allowed him to appoint three litmus-tested conservative justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Trump’s rise marked “Schlafly’s final victory,” historian Donald T. Critchlow wrote before the 2016 election.
In 2024, Trump’s margin with the Christian faithful held strong: He captured 82 percent of the white evangelical Protestant vote, 61 percent of the white Catholic, and 58 percent of the white nonevangelical Protestant.
Young Christians may have also played a bigger role in his second election. After decades of drop, the declining share of Americans who identify as Christians leveled off in the 2023-2024 Religious Landscape Study (RLS) — in part owing to the deepening ties between conservative and Christian identities among today’s American youth.
The survey found that 62 percent of Americans today identify as Christian, compared with under 50 percent in France.
In its first month and a half, Trump’s second administration has taken actions that would no doubt have Schlafly doing whatever the opposite of rolling over in a grave is.
The decades-long campaign to take advantage of the jurisprudential flaws of Roe had done its job, driving a political realignment that formed the American Right as it stands today.
Ten years after she called Bryn Mawr College’s decision to open admissions of transgender women to the all-women school “just plain nuts,” the White House issued an executive order proclaiming that “women are biologically female, and men are biologically male.”
And Trump-appointed interim US Attorney for the District of Columbia Ed Martin, who was in the crowd outside the Capitol on January 6, formerly worked with the Eagle Forum and said he keeps a picture with Schlafly in his office.
It’s evident, however, that abortion, an important ingredient in the religious Right’s decades-long kumbaya moment, was no longer the bloc’s driving political force in the 2024 election. With Roe already overturned, under 50 percent of Catholics and White protestants surveyed by the Pew Research Center said abortion would be “very important” in deciding their vote (compared with 77 percent of atheists).
But the decades-long campaign to take advantage of the jurisprudential flaws of Roe had done its job, driving a political realignment that formed the American Right as it stands today.
Other calls to arms can now be broadcast to the bloc. The first-place issue for white Catholics and protestants in 2024? Immigration.
And on the subject of tightening borders, US and French right-wingers can certainly agree.
