Earlier this week, the AfD parliamentary group in the Bundestag tabled a motion to ban medical professionals from administrating hormone blockers—which have been shown to cause severe, life-long injuries—to those under the age of 18, with the party’s deputy leader calling for the Ministry for Family Affairs’ so-called Rainbow Portal to be abolished, Junge Freiheit reports.
In its motion, the parliamentary group notes the following: so-called ‘gender dysphoria,’ i.e., the feeling of living with the wrong gender, has increased precipitously among children and young people; the number of outpatient clinics that treat ‘gender dysphoria’ with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and in some cases gender-reassignment surgeries, has increased fivefold between 2013 and 2018; and use of hormone blockers in children and adolescents has also increased at a comparable rate.
Additionally, the motion urges the government to allocate resources to initiate a study that “comprehensively examines the consequences of [hormone treatments]” in children and adolescents.
The French government has said it supports making the country the first in the world to enshrine abortion as a constitutional right, after the right-dominated senate voted down the left’s first attempt at a proposal.
Several political parties in France, from the left to the centrist lawmakers of Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, began pushing for abortion rights to be written into the constitution after the US supreme court’s decision in June to overturn the landmark Roe v Wade ruling, which recognised a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion and legalised it nationwide.
Two proposals for France to give unprecedented constitutional protection for the right to abortion are scheduled to be put before the national assembly, the parliament’s lower house, next month.
But on Wednesday night, rightwing senators from the Républicains party voted against the first attempt at a proposal in the the senate. At times, the debate was heated. Stéphane Ravier, who left Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National to join the Reconquête party led by the former TV pundit Éric Zemmour, said the proposal was an attack on life, “a waste of time”, “dangerous, useless”, and a piece of “agitprop”.
