The European Parliament (EP) today passed a resolution adopting the "Tarabella Report"
which promotes access to abortion as a fundamental right and as part of
sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) but also affirmed the
right of EU Member States to determine national policy on SRHR issues.
The EP has followed a long-standing principle of subsidiaritythat on the issue of abortion, the EP does not have "competence" deferring to individual governments to determine policy.
The "Tarabella
Report", the annual European Parliament report on the equality between
women and men in the European Union, named for Belgian MEP Marc
Tarabella, went beyond reporting on equality in the EU and became a
radical tool stating that SRHR includes access to abortion and advancing
support for measures to provide "ready access" to abortion.
Paragraph 45 of the "Tarabella Report" includes:
"Maintains that women must have control over their sexual and reproductive health and rights, not least by having ready access to contraception and abortion;
supports, accordingly, measures and actions to improve women's access
to sexual and reproductive health services and inform them more fully
about their rights and the services available;"
The resolution on the report was adopted during the EP session in Strasbourg by a vote of 441 to 205 with 52 abstaining. The measure was supported by the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D group) while the European People's Party (Christian Democrats), the largest political group in the EP, split its vote.
The report has been described as "contradictory". According to the Federation of Catholic Family Associations in Europe (FAFCE):
"...the text is contradictory as it also considers abortion in a fundamental rights perspective, a point of view already expressed by the Socialists and Democrats group of which the rapporteur Mr Tarabella is a member.
This political group aims at integrating "the right to abortion" into
the Fundamental Rights Charter of the European Union. An aim which is
utterly contradictory as the first article of the Charter states that
"Human dignity is inviolable. It must be respected and protected" and
the second article that "Everyone has the right to life".
CARE for Europe had worked to amend the report and commented:
"This
annual report is supposed to report on the state of equal pay, equal
rights and specific rights violations which need the EU to intervene in
promoting women's interests. But among the hopeful and helpful
considerations about sexualisation of women, exploitation through
trafficking and female genital mutilation, came the familiar Trojan
agenda of seeking to push sexual and reproductive health and rights
(SRHR) as a fundamental right."
"On
cases where subsidiarity arguments could be applied (it is a competence
of the member state not the EU)... it was affirmed that SRHR is not a
matter for the EU, but for each national government."