France’s landmark decision to codify the right to abortion in its constitution recently did not happen in a political vacuum. It is part of a global picture that sees states responding to the divisive politics of reproductive rights, either by taking steps to protect their citizens or to remove protections from them. France has gone one way, the US, for example, another.

European nations are divided on this issue, too. And it looks like we’re about to see those tensions feeding into the impending European parliament elections in June. Access to abortion is so restricted in Poland and Hungary as to be effectively impossible — in Malta it’s simply illegal. Parties jostling for seats in the European parliament are therefore making abortion part of their manifesto pledges. The left groupings hope to enshrine reproductive rights in a European charter. The insurgent far right, meanwhile, has very different ideas.

The women’s rights movement suffered a shock setback in Ireland last week when a proposal to remove sexist language from the national constitution was resoundingly defeated at a referendum. It had seemed obvious that the change would be supported by a public that has voted again and again to liberalise its constitution. But that, in hindsight, now looks like complacency. Writing from Ireland, constitutional scholar Eoin Daly walks us through what went wrong for the government of Leo Varadkar and explains why all was not what it seemed in this vote.

In a second referendum, Ireland was also presented with — and also rejected — another change to the constitution. This would have acknowledged that the word ‘family’ does not only apply to people who are married. The idea was to recognise that in this age, a family can be made up of single parents, unmarried parents, step-parents, to name just a few options. In fact, people are experimenting with many different ways to create families these days. At least one European website is now helping people choose co-parents outside of romantic relationships — sometimes for hands-on partnerships, and sometimes with other familial agreements in place. It’s surprising how many options are available.

Finland, meanwhile, has managed to reduce its notoriously high suicide rate by half with an aggressive national strategy. Here’s how it happened.

And as a committee calls on the Church of England to pay £1 billion in reparations to the descendants of enslaved people, it’s an apt moment to take a bold look at the relationship between organised religion and the slave trade. All Christian denominations profited from the sale of people, and as this history shows, this was in no small part because the bible was interpreted to justify it.