What was your life like when you were 10? I was in CM1. I liked French more than math, and chatting in class more than anything. I had two rabbits, and I wanted to become a veterinarian. I often dreamed that I was flying over the city like a bird. And on bad nights, I imagined my stomach swelling without my being able to stop it. That year, an old man raped me. My grandmother had already explained to me how babies are made, and the big belly of pregnant women has become my sword of Damocles. Mine, too narrow, was it going to burst like a balloon? How do you become a mother when you yourself still need your mom so much?
Luckily, my periods weren’t here yet, and the nightmare didn’t happen. Knowing, however, that there has been a law since 1975 called “Veil” which, if it had happened, would have given me the means to end the nightmare safely is, if not a remedy, at least a consolation and a victoire. I live in a country where, 23 years before a rapist trampled on my humanity and stole my childhood, women had officially become full human beings again by winning the right to abortion. The right not to have to risk their lives to free themselves from a role they do not want or cannot assume. The right not to see their body suddenly metamorphosed into a foreign body, an incubator that the State appropriates for months, ignoring the trauma thus inflicted on the woman who has to give up her belly so that a being she does not want cannot develop there.
This fundamental right, the Supreme Court of the United States has sold it to please religious obscurantism. And Ohio just denied it to a 10-year-old girl who was pregnant as a result of a rape. “Yes (…) It’s a shame that this is happening, but there is an opportunity for this woman, regardless of her age, to decide what she is going to do to help this life to be a productive human being “, Ohio Rep. Jean Schmidt said last April when asked hypothetically if a 13-year-old rape victim should be forced into the pregnancy. Why call a 10-year-old child or a 13-year-old adolescent the moment she is impregnated a woman? To tell him that his body is now the property of society. That she is a second-class citizen, since she is denied the right to self-determination which her male counterparts inviolably enjoy. And that its existence is of less value than theirs, since it can be sacrificed for the benefit of a pregnant fetus.
Ecole Normale and philosophy graduate, Marylin Maeso, a specialist in Albert Camus, works on essentialism and contemporary political philosophy.
Hannah Assouline-Editions de l’Observatoire
“Alleged Crusade for Life”
“All life is sacred” chanted, to justify the ban on abortion, people who, for many of them, are in favor of the death penalty and the possession of weapons in spite of the shootings which kill in United States several thousand people each year. The hypocrisy is flagrant, but what reveals its true nature is the plan, announced by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, to also reconsider the right to contraception. This so-called crusade for “life”, which washes the hands of the blood of those who will die of a clandestine abortion, a suicide or under the blows of a spouse who wants to prevent pregnancy, is the cache-sex of a fierce and millennial struggle for control of women’s bodies. The essence of woman, and therefore her ultimate reason for being, is thus defined by motherhood. His duty is to produce the children necessary for the perpetuation of the species and the proper functioning of society. In this, the pro-life ideology and the mentality of the predator have in common the same vision of the woman as an object that can be appropriated for sexual or reproductive purposes. In a society where abortion is a crime, to be a woman is to be available. In a country that elevates freedom to the rank of the most sacred human right, the abolition of this right is therefore the negation of the humanity of women, since their freedom to choose the existence they want to lead is always revocable.
For this reason, guaranteeing access to abortion is not only a vital necessity, it is also a political duty in a context where phallocratic domination so easily manipulates democratic levers. For the recognition of the humanity of women not to be partial, their rights as citizens must no longer be conditional. No freedom, no equality, without the right to abortion.