Hundreds take part in Paris march backing right to abortion

Hundreds of people have marched in Paris in support of the right to abortion for women across the world.

The demonstration comes six months after France became the first country to guarantee in its constitution a woman’s right to voluntarily terminate a pregnancy.

The protest, organised by civil society groups to mark International Safe Abortion Day, also called for greater and easier access to abortion in France, denouncing budget cuts, staff reductions and the closure of abortion centres and maternity wards, which organisers say all contribute to penalising women.

Sarah Durocher, president of France’s not-for-profit family planning services, said French women sometimes have to travel to another region to access the medical services needed to abort, denouncing the “obstacle course” they sometimes face.

Thibault Thomas, 28, said the ongoing trial of a man who has confessed to drugging his wife so that dozens of men could rape her while she was unconscious was one of the reasons that motivated him to attend the protest on Saturday.

“There’s a mood in France, a particular context with the Mazan trial,” he said, referring to the name of the small Provence town where the couple had bought their retirement home, and where the repeated rapes occurred.

“This sweeps away all the excuses, or all the mitigating circumstances that we thought could have existed before,” Mr Thomas said. “In fact it is something broader, generalised.”

Earlier this year, France became the only country to explicitly guarantee a woman’s right to voluntarily terminate a pregnancy, when lawmakers overwhelmingly approved a Bill to enshrine abortion rights in the constitution.

Abortion in France has been legal since 1975 and enjoys wide support across most of the political spectrum.

Enshrining the right in the Constitution sought to prevent the kind of rollback seen in the United States in recent years.