United in diversity? Framing future European integration through abortion politics in the European Parliament

The various crises faced by the EU, from the 2008 financial crisis to Brexit, and more recently the COVID-19 pandemic, have opened new avenues to discuss future European integration by envisioning future European identity and strengthening European citizens’ wellbeing. In the European Parliament (EP), Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have called for imagining a future integration that, considering current challenges, allocates more power to the EU for protecting and upholding its citizens’ rights and access to healthcare – supporting a Treaty change if need be. Simultaneously, the right of access to abortion, an issue that divided well-before current forms of opposition to gender equality (Verloo 2017) is regularly opposed in several member states and some seek to change their legislation towards more restriction. Without protection at EU level, the threat of states restricting their legislation for less abortion rights persists. As part of the EUGenDem project (https://projects.tuni.fi/eugendem/), this article scrutinizes the EP and its political groups – whose roles are to shape and politicize future EU policies and core values – and focus on how abortion rights are debated in them. By asking 1) how are abortion rights constructed in the EP and 2) what are the consequences of these constructions on future European integration; the article argues that it matters to understand the different opinions debated through abortion politics in the EP because they contribute to (re)negotiating future EU’s core values, identity and integration. Abortion politics is a novel and interesting case study to discuss EU integration as it brings forward diverging opinions about the role, meaning and scope of the EU. The research material consists of 122+ interviews conducted with MEPs and staff by members of the research project and of EP official documents and debates available online. Using a discourse analysis to studying European integration through abortion politics, this article contributes to gendering European integration through feminist perspectives (Lombardo and Kantola 2019).