Towards a common EU-abortion policy? The European Parliament's resolutions on abortion as a human rights issue

While abortion regulation may formally escape European Union competence, EU self-restraint may be under growing pressure. An EU common abortion policy may not be far-fetched, as impulses that trigger interest in abortion increase in Europe and beyond. In examining a recent series of European Parliamentary resolutions on abortion, this article shows how abortion has moved from the margins to the centre owing to increasing triggers coming from inside and outside the EU. In pushing abortion higher up the agenda, the European Parliament has framed abortion in human rights language and, most recently, called for abortion to be included as a right in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. The article argues that in adopting these resolutions, the Parliament may be exercising internal cultural diplomacy in human rights and, at the same time, projecting an image of EU unity while marking a binary division of the world: one moving towards more liberal abortion rules and the other towards greater restrictions.