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This is Mr. Olsen’s update on the new proposal for a new abortion law:

It all started with the press conference on 23 August, where the Health Minister presented the proposal for a new abortion law: The proposal includes an extension of the period that a pregnant person can have an abortion on demand from the current 12 weeks to 18 weeks. 

This is in the main a victory, even though we would have wanted the WHO guideline, which does not support a limit, or the law in Iceland, which allows abortion on demand until 22 weeks. However, given that any change in the law was unthinkable, even four years ago, this is great news. In Norway the debate around aborting some fetuses when you are pregnant with more than one, has been a heated one, and here the proposed law concluded that this is part of the on-demand right of the pregnant person.

• The law proposal has a more than 95% chance of passing in parliament even if the smallest of the two government parties, the Centre Party, objected to the above two parts of the proposal, but at the same time indicated that their MPs would be given a free vote on them.
• On the positive side, we are also highlighting the removal of the clause on the possibility of forced abortion on pregnant disabled persons, which was part of our old law. The text of the new law includes the right to be heard for disabled persons who are pregnant, and that abortion should not be the expected outcome for any group.
• On the negative side, the proposal is clearly a compromise between the two government parties, which means that there are some issues that we had expected would change that have been left more or less as they are in the current law:

1. Abortions will still only be allowed in hospitals, even though more than 90% of abortions in Norway are medical abortions, where most of the pregnant persons get pills at the hospital and then go home for the abortion. Sex og Politikk has argued for the possibility that GPs can provide abortion pills in the new law. Since a considerable part of the Norwegian population lives in rural areas, this means that the possibility to remove the burden of going to a hospital in some parts of the country was missed in the proposal.

2. The rights of the unborn are still retained in the preamble of the proposed law, which we find strange. This potentially contributes to the shame and stigma on those who consider having an abortion.

3. The proposed law includes an upper time limit for abortions at week 22. We find that surprising and are questioning what the logic is in such a limit.

Those are the highlights. Below are details on how we got here and what will happen from here. And how is it possible to propose a law that only parts of the government stand behind. And when is it likely that the proposed new law will be voted on and what is the likelihood that it will be passed.

Background

The current Norwegian government is a two-party coalition consisting of Norway’s main party for the last 100 years, the Labour party AP and our Centre party SP, which used to be called the farmers’ party and traditionally has its main support in the rural areas, but which had an exceptionally good election in 2021. The government parties still only control 76 of the 169 seats in parliament between them, so they need the support of at least one other party to have a majority. They have an agreement with the socialist left party SV to try to reach agreements with them to form a majority in most cases, including budgets. They have cooperated well on most issues, but on abortion the Labour party is seen as more progressive and has promised to fight for an extension to 18 weeks in their programme, while the Centre party wants to keep it at 12 weeks. So, this issue was left open in the government declaration, with each party “allowed” to fight for their position in the parliament. This will sound a bit weird to some, but it is not without precedence. 

The centre-right government that lost the election in 2021 introduced a restriction in the abortion law, which had allowed access to abortion on demand, when a pregnant person wanted to abort one or more than one fetus in a multiple pregnancy and continue the pregnancy with one or more of the remaining fetuses. At that time the Liberal party in government objected to this change and voted against it. However, the reform passed since the then opposition Centre party supported it. This broke with the 50-year-old compromise that the abortion law represented, and Sex og Politikk and others called for a new debate on the abortion law, now that this change in the law had been passed. And this led many of the political parties to include a change in the abortion law in their programmes. Note that none of the nine parties in the Norwegian parliament is calling for a more restrictive law than the current law.

Current standing of the parties in parliament

Five parties are calling for a time limit of 18 weeks or more: the Labour party, the Liberal party and the Green party that want 18 weeks and the Red party and the Socialist Left party, both of whom want to go even further. These five parties have a total of 80 MPs, so they need another 5 MPs to vote for the 18 weeks to have a majority.

So the decision is, on paper, left to the Progressive party, which is the extreme rightwing party. They don’t take a stand on “moral issues”, and their MPs can vote according to their consciences. They have 21 seats, of which a majority is expected to vote for 12 weeks. (But one of their MPs has since been expelled from the party.)

Then, in the spring, when we were all waiting for the law proposal from the Health Minister, five of the Progress party MPs called a press conference and said something like: “Dear Health Minister, why are you delaying proposing a new abortion law. Here you have 5 middle-aged men with the five votes you need for 18 weeks. Now table a good law proposal.” A few weeks after that, the Health Minister had to resign, meaning that the bill was not proposed in the spring as she had promised. But now the bill has been tabled and it should secure a majority through these five Progressive party MPs.

When will the vote be?

This is not yet known. The parliament re-opens from its summer break at the beginning of October. There are 39 law proposals that were sent on to the new parliament that were not finalised during the spring session. I would, however, be surprised if this bill takes very long to go through parliament. We have elections in September 2025, and it would be clever to resolve a topic on which the two government parties are in open conflict as quickly as possible. So, I would think that they will try to have the vote before Christmas. Since there was a whole process around this during the spring, it might not be necessary to have a full round of hearings, etc. again.

• Press statement by Sex og Politikk/ IPPF Norway (in Norwegian) 

The text was first published as part of a newsletter from The International Campaign for Women’s Right to Safe Abortion.