Cav's Place

Among this year’s slew of attacks on contraception, abortion and women’s rights, and now even China turning around from their previous policies even more and adopting more of a “stick” approach to increase natality that may well only lead to more STDs instead, the fact that the European Parliament voted in favor of the My Voice, My Choice European Citizens’ Initiative seems like a ray of light… Until you actually read any details and see how faint it is. After all, the Initiative doesn’t ask for abortion to be allowed all over the European Union, in fact even explicitly stating that it does not seek to change national laws in any way, but only demands the creation of a voluntary, opt-in financial mechanism to help countries provide abortion care to women who can’t access it in their own country and choose to travel to said other countries for it. Yes, that means that the intention is to provide those services free of charge to the women as a result, and that is important for many, but it may also be a lesser problem than the need to travel to another country for a procedure that’s traumatic in itself… And then there’s the question of what may happen to those women when they return to their home country that criminalizes what they just did.
What’s worse is that even such a weak demand faced a forceful opposition and actually seemed likely to be rejected until the last moment, so any hint of an actual reasonable request, like guaranteeing access to contraception and, when necessary, abortion all over the EU, would have reduced the chances to zero. And it’s not like this vote actually approved even this weak measure, the Parliament’s vote just showing support, the European Commission being the body that needs to approve it. And then, of course, even if it will be approved, the question of who’ll volunteer to opt into such a mechanism remains, the measure itself not even being worth the paper it’s printed on without the countries that border those that restrict abortion access becoming part of the mechanism.
Still, while I find it hard to actually be pleased by what, at this point, is little more than a declaration of intent, and a particularly unambitious one at that, it does once again prove that the European Union, or at least the European Parliament, remains the one faint beacon of hope when it comes to anything heading… Well, no, make that anything not rushing away from the right direction at full speed. Not that it’s not hard to even say that much, in good part considering the current dismantling of most aspects of the Green Deal, as woefully insufficient as it was even in its full form, the most recent being giving up on the 2035 internal combustion engine ban, but when the other “powers” of the world are definitely speeding along in all the wrong directions, here there may still be at least some sort of a starting point… If only we’ll actually manage to do something with it without things becoming impossibly worse first. And this may actually be the main reason why this is a ray of hope, faint as it may be: In part because it’s an approval of a European Citizens’ Initiative, a little step taken as a direct result of European citizens using a tool provided by the EU to demand it, but also because an opposing Initiative was rejected, albeit back in 2014.