Introduction
In 1971, 16-year-old Marie-Claire Chevalier found herself pregnant after being assaulted by a schoolmate, she then decided to have an abortion with the help of her mother and other women. The boy who had assaulted her, seeking revenge, reported her to the authorities, leading to her arrest and prosecution alongside the women who had helped her. The Nouvelle Vague’s most cutting-edge director Agnès Varda paid homage to the courage of Marie-Claire Chevalier through her feminist ciné-tract One Sings, the Other One Doesn’t (1977), in which she reconstructed the Bobigny abortion trial, where the renowned abortion rights lawyer Gisèle Halimi served as defence counsel.
Today, the Center for Reproductive Rights in Europe is highlighting the significant advances made in abortion law and policy across Europe, while underscoring the remaining barriers that continue to prevent many women from accessing essential reproductive healthcare in practice. While most European countries today allow abortion on request or on broad social grounds, significant obstacles persist beyond the legal framework. In several countries, medically unnecessary procedural and regulatory requirements remain enshrined in law, including mandatory waiting periods, compulsory counselling prior to abortion, the criminalisation of abortions performed outside the legal framework, and burdensome third-party authorisation requirements.
Thanks to the “My Voice, My Choice: For Safe and Accessible Abortion” campaign, the EU Parliament favourably supported the call, that was then formally established by the European Commission that confirmed that existing social cohesion funds can be utilized by Member States voluntarily in providing safe abortion services to individuals who cannot access them in their home countries. However, political pushback, legal limits, and a lack of direct funding are the major structural complications that still stand in the way of the initiative’s goals.
Legal Situation: What the Law Promises and Where It Fails
The legal baseline today is, on the surface, a genuine advance from the world Varda depicted. Most European countries allow abortion on request during early pregnancy, with twelve weeks from the last menstrual period being the most common cutoff, and a handful of countries extend that window to fourteen weeks or beyond. France has gone furthest, becoming the first country in the world to anchor the right to abortion directly in its constitution, and remains the only EU member state where abortion is entirely free of charge for all women. Spain has since moved to follow.
But two member states still sit at the far edge of this map. Malta had the most restrictive abortion law in Europe until 2023, with abortion illegal without exception, a position shaped in large part by the Roman Catholic identity of the vast majority of its population. Even the narrow 2023 reform only permits ending a pregnancy to save the life of a pregnant person facing immediate risk. Poland’s situation is, if anything, more politically fraught, such that abortion is legal only when the pregnancy results from a criminal act or when the woman’s life or health is in danger, following a 2021 Constitutional Tribunal ruling that struck down the previous ground allowing termination in cases of fetal malformation. A parliamentary attempt to liberalise the law in 2024 failed by a handful of votes. Rights groups describe both countries’ positions in stark terms. Poland and Malta remain the only EU countries that have not reformed their restricted laws, part of a broader pattern in which around 20 million people across Europe lack access to safe abortion services, and more than 5,000 European women are forced to cross borders every year to obtain care.
That figure above is where the film’s second theme, transnational solidarity, stops being a metaphor and becomes a literal description of present-day reproductive life in Europe. This is also where the legal picture gets more complicated than a simple map of liberal versus restrictive states can show. Legality is not the same as access, and most of the meaningful failures in European abortion policy now live in that gap.
Conscientious objection is important to consider here. In Italy, abortion has been legal on request since 1978, but estimates of the share of doctors who invoke conscientious objection range from 63 to 80 percent, and similar patterns of high refusal rates have been documented in Croatia and Romania. In some public hospitals, every doctor on staff is an objector, which means a legal right can be entirely unusable in practice, depending on where a woman happens to live. Waiting periods compound this problem. Twelve EU countries require a mandatory waiting period between the initial request and the procedure, ranging from three days in Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Luxembourg, Portugal, and Spain to seven days in Italy. Add to this compulsory counselling requirements, gestational limits that vary sharply between neighbouring states, and funding rules that often restrict public coverage to residents or to medically indicated abortions, frequently excluding non-resident, undocumented, or migrant women from publicly funded care altogether, and a picture emerges of a right that is legally secured almost everywhere, but practically rationed by geography, income, immigration status, and the willingness of individual doctors to perform a legal procedure.
This is precisely the terrain the My Voice, My Choice initiative was built to address, not by rewriting national abortion laws, which lie outside EU competence, but by asking Brussels to help fund the gap between them. Its scale was itself a statement. The initiative collected over 1.1 million valid signatures from citizens across the EU and met the required threshold in nineteen separate member states, making it one of the largest civic mobilisations the European Citizens’ Initiative mechanism has ever produced. The European Parliament responded by voting 358 to 202, with 79 abstentions, to endorse a call for an EU-funded, voluntary solidarity mechanism to finance abortion care for women without access to safe and legal abortion at home.
The Commission’s answer, delivered in February 2026, illustrates exactly how contested even a “solution” can be. Citing the EU Treaties’ limits on its competence in public health, the Commission concluded that member states can rely on existing instruments, specifically the European Social Fund Plus to support access to abortion, voluntarily and in line with their own national laws. Commentators were blunt about what this meant in practice. This meant that there will be no new legal instrument, no dedicated resources, and continued dependence on the political will of individual governments to redirect their own funding. Legal observers have called it a masterclass in EU manoeuvring, essentially a decision that creates a financial bridge across borders without ever establishing a European right to abortion, because such a right would likely exceed the EU’s competence and be struck down.
Seen against Varda’s film, this is a strangely familiar shape. The Bobigny trial did not overturn France’s abortion law, the 1920 statute technically remained on the books until the Veil Law two years later. What it did was expose, publicly and undeniably, the distance between what the law claimed to protect and what women were actually forced to do to survive it. The EU’s current position occupies a similar space that is nothing more than an acknowledgment that the barriers are real, wrapped in a structural refusal to fully resolve them. Even the modest step of allowing ESF+ funds to be used this way drew formal objection from the EU bishops’ conference, which argued it would divert resources from the fund’s original social purpose. This is a reminder that, as in 1972, the politics of abortion in Europe are still being fought as much over legitimacy and framing as over the letter of the law.
What remains, then, is a continent where the legal right to abortion is nearly universal and the lived right to it is not. Where a woman’s actual ability to end a pregnancy safely still depends less on EU law than on which country, region, or hospital she happens to be standing in. It is this gap, between formal legality and functional access, that the next section, on agency, takes up directly.
The Question of Agency
Having access to abortion is not only a right to health but also a right to exist. On the one hand, abortion is a practice that involves medical assistance to prevent severe morbidity, including life-threatening conditions, co-occurring illnesses, and non-viable pregnancies. On the other hand, it is a practice that impacts women’s and non-binary people’s health holistically. A denied abortion can lead to serious psychological complications, including elevated or acute anxiety, higher stress levels, especially when one’s partner is abusive or does not allow self-determination, and a long-term mental burden that can influence both the mother and the lives of existing and future children. More than fifty years of psychological research have shown that denying such reproductive rights can lead to serious mental health issues.
The University of California, San Francisco, in a five-year longitudinal study of more than 1,000 women across 21 U.S. states, found that those who had an abortion were no more likely to report negative emotions, mental health symptoms, or suicidal thoughts than those who were denied an abortion. Five years later, 99% of those who had an abortion felt they had made the right decision, mostly experiencing feelings of relief. Women who were denied abortions experienced more psychological problems than those who received them, including anxiety, stress, lower self-esteem, and lower life satisfaction. Over time, they also developed more physical health problems than those who received an abortion, with two participants dying from complications of childbirth.
Denied abortions can also lead to greater economic hardship. A research summary from the Turnaway Study by the Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health group at the University of California, San Francisco, reported that women who were denied an abortion experienced more bankruptcies and evictions, as well as higher poverty rates. These women were also more likely to be forced into a violent relationship or to raise children alone. Children from unwanted pregnancies also suffer such consequences, experiencing, in the long term, more social, emotional, and mental health problems, and being more likely to be hospitalized for psychiatric problems than their siblings from planned pregnancies.
Travel for abortion exacts additional psychological and financial tolls, making it harder for those with fewer resources to access abortion. These barriers can lead to stress, anxiety, depression, and a loss of autonomy.
Varda’s One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977) has self-determination at its centre. Varda displays the importance of not losing one’s autonomy, especially when it comes to bodily rights. In the film, Varda presents a reality in which women are able, and therefore enabled, to choose for themselves. Varda shows that it is possible to experience both abortion and maternity, and that these do not constitute objective milestones within one’s life path, rather, their meaning is defined by one’s subjectivity and by one’s ability and desire to continue, or not continue, a pregnancy. The centralisation of self-determination as a practice of freedom makes the docu-film a manifesto for reproductive rights, making it clear that, as the body is one’s vehicle through life, it is fundamental to be able to exercise such determination in conditions of safety, solidarity, and freedom. While Varda had celebrated women’s solidarity as a substitute for the lack of state and social support, it is fundamental today that these practices of solidarity become legally recognised at a transnational level.
Recommendations and Conclusion
The preceding sections have shown that the distance between a legal right and a livable one is where reproductive freedom in Europe currently breaks down. Territorial access means little, however, without parity of practice. A woman in Warsaw and a woman in Amsterdam should not face categorically different realities depending on how many doctors in their region have registered as conscientious objectors, or whether their nearest clinic imposes a mandatory waiting period their neighbouring country dropped years ago. This calls for minimum EU-wide standards on information provision, referral obligations for objecting practitioners, and enforceable limits on delay. This is not to override national abortion law, which remains outside EU competence, but to ensure that wherever abortion is legal, it is also reachable within a clinically reasonable window.
Closing that distance requires treating access as a matter of territory, not citizenship. A right tied to nationality or residency status necessarily excludes the people most likely to need it urgently, for example, asylum seekers, undocumented migrants, cross-border workers, and the thousands of women who already travel each year precisely because their own state has failed them. Anchoring the right to whoever is physically present, rather than to who holds the right papers, is the only version of “safe abortion” that actually matches how women move through Europe today.
None of this functions without an explicit grounding in privacy and dignity. The Bobigny trial was, at its core, a case about the state inserting itself into a decision that belonged to Marie-Claire Chevalier and no one else, her body, her mother’s kitchen table, her right to keep the details of her own life out of a courtroom. The EU’s current approach, funding access indirectly through cohesion instruments while declining to name abortion as a right, replicates a milder version of that same discomfort, a reluctance to say plainly that this is a matter of bodily autonomy, not merely public health logistics. Recognising a right to privacy and dignity in reproductive decisions is not a symbolic addition. Instead, it is the legal language that would finally let ‘access’ mean something more than ‘permission that is conditionally granted.’
Psychological support deserves equal weight in any policy response. The Turnaway Study’s real contribution was showing that the harm was never abortion itself, but the aftermath of being denied one in the form of economic precarity, prolonged proximity to abusive partners, and children absorbing the instability of an unplanned birth. That evidence should inform how EU-funded reproductive healthcare is designed, not only funded. Post-procedure counselling and mental health support should sit alongside travel and clinical costs as core, not optional, components of any cross-border solidarity mechanism.
Varda’s film ends without resolving whether Suzanne or Pomme made the right choice, because the film’s entire argument is that there was no single right choice to be found, only the right to make one. That is, in the end, what this piece has tried to trace at the policy level, but a demand that the decision itself remain where it belongs, with the person living it. The My Voice, My Choice initiative, the Commission’s cautious funding compromise, and the patchwork of national laws it responds to are all, in their own way, still negotiating the same question Gisèle Halimi forced into a French courtroom in 1972. The question was whether the state’s role is to adjudicate a woman’s body or to make sure she is free enough, informed enough, and safe enough to adjudicate it herself. Fifty years on, the legal answer in Europe is closer than it once was but as Malta, Poland, and the quiet gaps inside even the most liberal legal codes make clear, ‘closer’ is not the same as ‘there.’ Varda’s cinema insisted that solidarity could carry women the rest of the way when the law would not. It is now fundamental that the law finally fulfills its task.
Image Credits: https://it.pinterest.com/pin/289004501107222833/
