Reproductive Rights: A New Era?
Today, March 4th 2024, France becomes the first country in the world to enshrine the right to abortion in its Constitution. In the United States, by contrast, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022, and ruled that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion, sending legal and social aftershocks throughout the country. Today, 14 states in the US have near-total abortion bans with no exception for rape or incest; 12 other states have severe restrictions. This new landscape puts the United States at odds with trends in many Western countries, including France, where abortion became legal in 1975. What do these developments reveal about democratic trends in the United States and France? What can we learn from comparing the legal and political implications of this issue in these two countries? To answer these questions, we went back to a Vis A Vis conversation from June 2023, when Emmanuel Kattan, Director of Alliance, spoke to two constitutional experts, Olatunde Johnson and Eleonora Bottini, on the subject of abortion and its place in French and American constitutions.
Olatunde Johnson is the Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’59 Professor of Law at Columbia University. She teaches and writes about anti-discrimination law, congressional power, and courts. She is a recipient of several awards for her teaching and service at Columbia Law School. Prior to entering academia, Professor Johnson clerked for Justice John Paul Stevens on the U.S. Supreme Court, served as constitutional and civil rights counsel to Senator Edward M. Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and as a lawyer at the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund.
Eleonora Bottini is Full Professor of Public Law at the University of Caen-Normandy (France) and is currently the Martin-Flynn Global Law Professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law. She served previously as associate professor at Sorbonne Law School in Paris and was the Alliance Visiting Professor at Columbia University. She specializes in comparative constitutional law, French constitutional law and legal theory. She has published several articles and book chapters in French, Italian and English and she is the author of a book based on her PhD thesis, “Constitutional sanction: study of a doctrinal argument” (Dalloz, 2016, in French), on the theoretical origins of judicial review.
