Women's Rights Threatened in France

This month's issue of Le Monde diplomatique has a number of interesting and important articles. Four in particular caught my attention immediately: "Traité secret sur l'immatériel" by Florent Latrive (treating intellectual propriety rights and the sharing of ideas), "De la valeur ignorée des métiers" by Pierre Rimbert (weighing what people are paid for their work against their contributions to society), "Et pour quelques tomates de plus" by Pierre Daum and Aurel (the plight of farm workers in southern Spain, pointing to a multitude of reasons to boycott tomato sales in Europe), and lastly, the article I chose to translate and post below:  Sabine Lambert's "Le droit à lavortement menacé, 'une affaire de bonnes femmes.'" Some of these articles are found in this month's online issue of Le Monde diplomatique. Not all are available in the International issue in English

The Right to Abortion Threatened

written  by Sabine Lambert, student in sociology

On the set of Les maternelles, broadcast by France 5 on January 21, a woman emotionally describes the abortion she'd undergone in a hospital...without anesthesia. She isn’t talking about an abortion 40 years ago: she’s not even 25 years old, lives in the Paris suburbs. On the verge of tears, she recalls the details of her ordeal, from the usual struggle to get an appointment, to the operating table where she had the abortion amidst the incessant comings and goings of hospital personnel, and with no anesthesia. She was not given the option. As she tells her story, the journalist interviewing her repeatedly exclaims in surprise, “unbelievable!” Finally the interviewer turns to the doctor sharing the stage with them to ask how such a situation could still be possible in France. The gynecologist wearily affirms that there are indeed some doctors who use pain and humiliation to make women pay for their decision to get an abortion.

Abortions without anesthesia are apparently rare. While knitting needles and blood poisoning seem to be things of the past in France. Being shown your “baby” on the ultrasound or being asked condescendingly how you “managed to get pregnant” are not. And the question of how to abort? Drugs, for example, are often presented as a progressive alternative to surgery. Given the current shortage of hospital beds, drugs may become a means of “freeing up the operating rooms,” as it is sometimes more prosaically put. Clearing abortion patients from the holy operating block, delivering the immaculate temple, so to speak, of this irrelevance, might free up time for the big brass to remove tumors and implant eggs in courageous albeit infertile women – obviously more lucrative and gratifying than an ordinary suction abortion.

Apparently abortion, like contraception, is considered solely a "women's issue." When their pregnancy tests show positive, it's their problem; if they decide to have an abortion, the weight of the decision is again on their shoulders. Those who think this way will respond, “obviously” – since it concerns women’s choices and women’s bodies. Women asked for this freedom; let them deal with it. Only a vaguely subversive, exotic sexuality seems to emerge from the domain of the “private.” Little does it matter that women spend more time cleaning toilets, taking care of children and slaving away for unequal pay than they do playing with the latest sex toy in vogue.

It appears that a woman’s life is only of interest if filled with glamor and excitement — a description that doesn't fit abortion. Abortion is too often left to the militant anti-abortionists, who are all too happy to take it on, and seriously. They may not be as numerous in France as in Spain, the US or in Latin American countries, where religion feeds their numbers, but their views are blossoming on fertile ground in France. The media contributes to anti-abortionist growth by often putting them in a favorable spotlight. The movement is also developing modern tools to isolate women and relegate them to the recesses of their fragile psyches. Pro-lifers take advantage of this climate and increasingly use their Internet sites to advance anti-abortion goals by responding subtlety to women “in distress.” We would be wrong to consider these groups simply as a mish-mash of reactionary crackpots. They are abandoning flagrant lies, shocking slogans and illegal provocations. Their web sites consistently resemble genuine ancillary sites of the Ministry of Health…to the point of being mistaken for them. Names such as the “National Rating Center,” toll-free numbers and Anglophone university studies, are helping them build a very real respectability.

This allows them to more easily insert themselves into the “psychological turmoil”— notably the famous “post-abortion syndrome”— to which all women are supposedly vulnerable after a voluntary abortion. Women who choose abortion are depicted as veritable wrecks, susceptible to a multitude of dangers: alcoholism, suicide, poverty, loneliness, or job loss. These apocalyptic descriptions are generally supported by grandiloquent statements, waxing lyrical on the “urge to bear children” that is some sort of natural occult force for any self-respecting woman…and whose emergence at times requires forceps. It’s on this point that the discourse of anti-abortionists joins the more common and omnipresent discourse of those that describe motherhood not as a choice, but as a force above and beyond women. The recent debate on “pregnancy denial” has contributed to accentuating this psychologizing vision. It once again calls into question, by a very practical magnifying glass effect, women’s capacity to decide what is good for them.

If we add to that multiple articles regularly consecrated to the sublime fertility rate of French women, why would it surprise us in such a climate that deciding to have an abortion may be painful? And consequently, how can abortion be experienced as anything but the “obligatory drama” that the experts describe as a villainous and indelible scar on female nature, the failure of a woman’s life? How surprising can it be that this necessarily painful act becomes so? Skimming through Internet forums to read the long laments of women who have had abortions reveals the effects of these self-fulfilling prophecies. Those who dared go against the dictates of nature and their “female instincts” seem to have perfectly internalized their punishment. It is translated through nightmares or imaginary babies who grow up, who have birthdays; it expresses itself by heavy feelings of guilt, anxiety, loneliness and shame. As for those women who do not experience this pain and regret, they are reduced to silence if they do not wish to be seen as abnormal, heartless or mentally ill.

The threats weighing against the right to abortion go beyond the waiting period and the list of the latest abortion clinics shut down, even though physical access to abortion remains an obviously crucial issue. More often an indirect than head-on, this threat consists of overlapping, multiple factors. Among them, a division between “private” and “political” – or “public” – that hangs on like a village of very gallant Gauls. It is highlighted, for example, in the attitude of the OFPRA (French office for the protection of refugees and stateless people), which argues that the rape and violence done to women are not valid reasons to request asylum, since they concern problems related to “the private lives” of women (1).  This dichotomy is possible because of the constantly updated anchoring of women in nature and family circles, as “less social” beings than men. It excludes them from history and submits them to specific and implicit laws. It is this division that sends battered women back to their "responsibilities" and encourages indifference to the lamentable inequality of the division of household tasks.

This last issue, which often provokes sarcasm from those who rarely pick up a broom, is not trivial. On the contrary, it reveals that relations between the sexes, while perhaps individually harmonious, are nothing less than social and, whether lovers of social light-mindedness like it or not, they are the fruits of a power relationship. If it were a matter of attitudes needing a tweek then “we would have to undertake the education of supervisors and managers so that they would do their part of the typing and industrial work,” humorously writes French feminist Colette Guillaumin (2). This way, “by reforming people’s attitudes,” we would see a “benign society” emerge.

In a word, this dichotomy allowed a doctor to decide with complete impunity, based on his good grace or his mood of the day, that the (not quite really a) patient on his table would be just fine without anesthesia.

1) Jean-Marc Manach, “Le viol des réfugiées ‘relève de leur vie privée’”, Bugbrother.net, December 11, 2009.

2) Colette Guillaumin, Sexe, race et pratique du pouvoir. L’idée de nature, Indigo et Côté-Femmes, Paris, 1992, p. 231.