In advance of initial forecasts, on February 25th the European Commission will make public its decision regarding the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) «My Voice, My Choice: For Safe and Accessible Abortion», presented to the European Commission on September 1st 2025. This initiative – which last December 17th, after the public hearing on December 2nd, already received the favorable (but non-binding) opinion of Parliament European with the resolution approved by a large majority (358 yes, 202 no, 79 abstentions) – requests that the European Union (EU) implement a specific mechanism to finance and organize the trips of women who go to have an abortion in a country where the legislation on “voluntary termination of pregnancy” is more permissive than that of their country of origin. It essentially requests that the EU financially subsidizes “abortion tourism”. Nothing more hostile to the roots and soul of Europe which places human dignity and the resulting human rights at the foundation of its very existence as a political project.
The content of the request is totally unacceptable, because it is highly ideological: the aim is to convey with all the force of the European institutions abortion as a “right” – falling within the so-called “sexual and reproductive rights” – guaranteed and protected also economically, also violating the limits of the EU’s competences because the laws on abortion fall within the competence and regulatory discretion of the member states.
Using the EU as a means to go beyond the legislative provisions drawn up by the representatives of individual states means both transform a space of cooperation into an instrument of ideological normalizationand to completely overturn the meaning of human rights by making them weapons against the weakest among men: unborn children who are denied not only the right to be born but also the recognition of their full belonging to the human family.
Furthermore, the distortion of the principle of equality is also dramatic, not connected to the inherent and equal value of every human being – including even those who have not yet been born – but connected to the equal behavior that one wants to adopt: in this case abortion. The supporters of “My voice, my choice” believe that the objective of the initiative is to reduce inequalities in access to safe abortion between Member States. Absurd. It would be like saying, just to give an example, that to reduce inequalities in access to the death penalty in countries where it is subject to different regulations, the UN should make funds available so that the condemned can be transferred to places where capital punishment is guaranteed to the maximum extent (instead, coincidentally, the United Nations General Assembly since 2007 has repeatedly issued resolutions calling for a general moratorium on capital punishment in the name of human dignity and the consequent right to life). The overbearing arrogance of the initiative called “My voice, my choice” is therefore clear.
For this reason, the European Federation One of Us, which unites 50 associations from 18 different European countries – including the Italian Movement for Life – with the aim of stopping the subsidization of cross-border abortion and denouncing the EU’s incompetence to intervene on this issue, has courageously launched the NoAbortionTourism.eu campaign, open to online subscription by all European citizens (click here to sign).
In support of the One of Us petition comes what was said by Pope Leo who expressed «deep concern regarding projects aimed at financing cross-border mobility aimed at accessing the so-called “right to safe abortion” and considers it deplorable that public resources are allocated to the suppression of life, rather than being invested in supporting mothers and families. The primary objective must remain the protection of every unborn child and effective and concrete support for every woman so that she can welcome life” (speech of 9 January). And how can we forget, with the wars afflicting Europe and the world, the words of Mother Teresa, “saint of the last” and Nobel Peace Prize winner, who stated that “the greatest destroyer of peace is abortion”?
Go ahead, then. We join and invite you to join the campaign as much as possible NoAbortionTourism.eu! We give our voice to give voice to unborn children and we choose to be alongside women to affirm their right to be freed from the constraints that take away the courage and joy of welcoming their children.
