Effective on April 1, 2016, all acts connected to abortion will be fully reimbursed by the French Social Security system, including consultations, ultrasounds, and laboratory analysis. This measure, announced in the decree published on March 8, 2016 in the Official Journal, completes the 100% reimbursement plan for covering abortion costs, started in 2013.
As Alliance VITA has underlined several times, this measure leads to discrimination between the act of abortion and the pursuit of pregnancy, since for example the cost of the first 2 ultrasounds before the end of the fifth month of pregnancy are only 70% reimbursed.
Multiple measures have been taken in these past years by the government, all aimed at the same objective of facilitating access to abortion: removing the notion of distress, abolishing the one-week reflection period, multiplying the number of professionals who can perform abortions (midwives, health centers, etc.), giving health centers performance contracts stipulating the number of abortions to be performed, requiring all healthcare professionals to inform patients about abortive methods, etc.
This policy, which continues and expands that carried out for 40 years, is a failure: the number of abortions in France is not dropping and has attained a high level, between 220,000-230,000 abortions per year. Thus, the rate of abortions in France is twice higher than that of Germany, which has officially just dropped below 100,000 abortions in 2015.
Alliance VITA strongly reminds of the urgency for a real genuine abortion prevention policy. And yet, informing women with unforeseen or difficult pregnancies on social aids to which they can have access would be essential so that abortion should not be a fatality.
