President Emmanuel Macron has said that a bill would be prepared “in the coming months” to give ‘iron-clad’ protection to abortion ‘rights’. In France currently there are more than 200,000 abortions annually.

“This will enshrine the freedom of women to choose abortion, and be a solemn guarantee that nothing can ever limit or abolish this right because it will have become irreversible,” Mr Macron said.

“The rights of women are always a fragile conquest,” he added.

A national law made abortion legal in France in 1975, and no serious threat to its legality exists today, but the overturning of Roe v Wade in the USA last year has prompted this French effort.

“Courts in other countries in the world have returned to the question of women’s rights because reactionary ideologues are seeking their revenge on the lawyers and activists who once made them retreat,” Mr. Macron said.

Macron was speaking at a national tribute for Gisele Halimi, a deceased feminist activist and abortion pioneer.

However, her son Serge Halimi, a journalist, stayed away from the ceremony, saying it came “at a time when the country is rising up against an extremely unfair pensions reform”.