Combating Coercion: Charlène Bernard Speaks Out at European Parliament

Charlène Bernard was 27, unexpectedly pregnant, and clear about what she wanted: to keep her child. What she encountered instead, she told the European Parliament's Committee on Petitions on June 23, 2026, was a sequence of pressure from her partner, her physician, and a counselor at a clinic affiliated with the International Planned Parenthood Federation — pressure that ended in an abortion she had never chosen. "What still hurts so much is the absence of my child, who is the first victim in my story," she told EWTN News. "I am speaking out today so that what I have experienced has meaning, to protect other women from this painful ordeal, and to protect unborn children."[^1]

The petition Bernard launched, backed by the European Centre for Law and Justice and supported across several political groups in Parliament, asks whether European institutions and member states are doing enough to protect women who wish to continue their pregnancies when they face pressure from partners, medical professionals, or difficult social circumstances. Parliamentary backing came most notably from the European People's Party, the European Conservatives and Reformists, Patriots for Europe, and Europe of Sovereign Nations.[^1]

A 2024 IFOP survey, cited by Alliance Vita, found that 29 percent of French women who had undergone an abortion reported feeling pressure from the health professional they consulted. France recorded 251,270 abortions in 2024; applied proportionally, that figure suggests roughly 72,900 women experienced professional pressure during what was supposed to be a protective clinical encounter.[^1]

Why coercion happens

Coercion of a pregnant woman toward termination rarely announces itself as coercion. It arrives wearing the face of concern: the partner who frames his pressure as worry about finances, the physician who presents termination as the medically reasonable option without exploring alternatives, the counselor who defaults to a clinical pathway the institution already presumes.

The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous offers a candid diagnosis of how unchecked instincts produce harm in relationships: "Every time a person imposes his instincts unreasonably upon others, unhappiness follows... Demands made upon other people for too much attention, protection, and love can only invite domination or revulsion."[^2] The observation was made about alcoholism, but the structure it describes — instinct overrunning relationship — fits the coercive dynamic Bernard experienced. A partner who pressures a woman toward termination is managing his own fear: fear of financial strain, of changed life circumstances, of losing a relationship he experiences as threatened. The pressure is often self-protective, and it produces damage in proportion to its intensity.

Professional coercion carries a different charge. A clinician or counselor who steers a woman away from a stated preference is enacting an institutional presumption — that abortion is the efficient solution to an unwanted pregnancy — one so embedded in clinical culture that the professional may genuinely not perceive the steering as pressure. It feels like guidance. Gabor Maté argues that "in the long term coercion creates more problems than it solves,"[^3] and that genuine recovery requires professional support oriented toward the person's actual needs rather than management toward an outcome the system finds convenient. A clinical encounter that redirects a woman away from her stated intention toward an institutional default meets that description whether or not anyone in the room names it that way.

There is also a subtler psychological force at work: the need for self-affirmation through the other's compliance. A partner who cannot tolerate a woman's autonomous decision experiences her choice as a judgment on him. A professional who cannot support a woman's stated goal experiences her persistence as resistance to clinical reason. In both cases, pressure is partly an attempt to restore the coercing party's sense of competence or relevance. The woman's intact choice implicitly refuses to confirm the other's self-image. This pattern appears in any relationship where one party holds structural power and cannot separate their self-worth from the other's agreement.

What accompaniment requires

Bernard's account, and the data behind it, point toward a specific failure: the absence of any professional who simply held space for what she actually wanted. The therapeutic alliance rests on attunement to the client's stated goals. A woman who presents in a counseling or medical context with a clear intention to carry a pregnancy to term is exercising personal agency that any person-centered framework takes as both a given and a goal. To meet that intention with redirection breaches the alliance before it has even formed.

Genuine accompaniment requires, first, that the professional register the woman's stated intention without measuring it against institutional norms. The Twelve Steps tradition, which has sustained millions of people through recovery from compulsive and destructive patterns, is built on exactly this posture: the sponsor or guide does not impose a direction but walks alongside, offering presence rather than prescription.[^2] The clinical equivalent is a willingness to sit with a woman's uncertainty, her fear, her partner conflict, her ambivalence — without foreclosing any of it toward a predetermined outcome.

Second, accompaniment requires that the professional name the pressures operating in the woman's environment. A partner who repeatedly urges termination, a physician who expresses incomprehension at the desire to continue, a counseling center that has no framework for supporting a woman who wants to keep her child — these are sources of harm, and identifying them as such is part of what it means to stand with the person rather than with the system surrounding her.

Third, accompaniment requires structural support that outlasts a single appointment. Maté's point applies directly: the alternative to coercion is the provision of actual conditions — relational, material, emotional, medical — that make a genuine choice possible.[^3] A woman who wants to continue a pregnancy needs to know that the professional across from her is not the last line of support, and that she can be connected to communities and relationships that will sustain what she is choosing.

Bernard spoke before the European Parliament so that her experience would have meaning — so that another woman in the same room, facing the same pressures, would find a professional who believed her, stayed with her, and helped her reach the door she had already chosen to walk through.

References

[^1]: Bryan Lawrence Gonsalves, "French woman's petition asks Europe to support mothers facing pressure to abort," EWTN News, July 2, 2026.

[^2]: Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions (New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 2002), Step Four — "Every time a person imposes his instincts unreasonably upon others, unhappiness follows."

[^3]: Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2010) — "in the long term coercion creates more problems than it solves."