THE LAW OF ABORTION IN THE EUROPEAN UNION: PRELIMINARY REFLECTIONS ON TENSIONS AND SPEECH BETWEEN CITIZENSHIP AND HUMAN RIGHTS

This article tackles the issue of free abortion on demand rights within the European Union (EU), on the one hand through the lens of citizenship and, on the other hand, through the lens of human rights. It is also part of the ongoing writing of a book on the right to free abortion on demand across the European Union. First, the author explains the choice of an approach considering the citizenship regime, rather than the reproductive, sexual, intimate or bodily citizenship. Therefore, this concept allows us to avoid a major trap, namely the tendency to make the idea of citizenship more and more polysemous, as it constantly covers newly added dimensions. Second, this paper interrogates the right to abortion through the lens of both citizenship and human rights, and at the same time it questions it beyond the simple process of the legitimization of its claim as well as of the actors pretending to be its appropriate interlocutors within the public and political spheres. As a result, one of the major contributions of this paper is related to a further refinement of the current potentialities of the concept of citizenship regime useful for tackling the issue of free abortion on demand (IVG), inasmuch as one considers the clashing but also emancipatory nature of the reference to human rights, since the actors who make themselves visible in the public sphere invoke human rights to reinvent citizenship through the shifting of the borders between the private and the public spheres, between the particular and the universal.