French Fill Streets To Back Abortion Rights

Thousands of people marched through the streets of Paris on Saturday to support abortion and women’s rights they fear are threatened.

The broad boulevards of the city center were a rowdy sea of singing, dancing demonstrators carrying banners proclaiming, “Hands off our right to abortion - it’s for women to decide, not the Pope,” and, “Our bodies belong to us.”

Police said 20,000 people marched from the Place de la Bastille to the Opera, but demonstration organizers claimed twice that many participants.

Abortion opponents have become active in France in the past few years, chaining themselves inside clinics and confronting women seeking abortions and doctors who perform them.

Abortion has been legal in France, and reimbursed under the state health plan, since 1975.

But with the rise in anti-abortion groups and May’s election of a conservative government, many French people now fear such long-acquired rights may not last.

An interim conservative government in 1993 removed contraceptives from the list of medicines paid for by state health insurance, overturning a 1971 law.

Irene Jouannet, 50, marching with her 24-year-old daughter, said she had been active in the women’s rights movement in the 1970s but that she and others “had fallen asleep” once the rights they sought were made law.

Her daughter, Delphine, said that women’s rights to equal job opportunities and pay also were high among her and her contemporaries’ concerns.

France has 12-percent unemployment, and women constitute 53 percent of the jobless.