The expression used Tuesday evening during his press conference by President Emmanuel Macron sparked strong reactions from feminists and the left of the political spectrum.
“Our France will also be stronger by the revival of its birth rate.” So spoke Emmanuel Macron. During his press conference on Tuesday January 16, the President of the Republic announced his desire to implement new birth leave and launch a plan to combat infertility. Objective: to enable “demographic rearmament”. An expression in the same vein as the now famous “civic rearmament”, previously mentioned by Emmanuel Macron on the subject of school, but which will have raised eyebrows from more than one feminist, and not only that! On the left, many voices have also been raised against this expression and more generally against this political will.
“LEAVE OUR UTERUS IN PEACE”, commented on X (ex-Twitter) the president of the Women’s Foundation Anne-Cécile Mailfert, leaving little doubt as to her fed up. While the historian Marine Rouch, interviewed by the HuffPostnotes that “to refer to rearmament is to use a very virilistic, warlike and violent lexical field”, the National Federation of Information Centers on the Rights of Women and Families (CIDFF), for its part, made shares his “deep concern” after Emmanuel Macron’s announcements, denouncing: “The implementation of pronatalist policies, profoundly contrary to the autonomy of women, constitutes a worrying political and social regression.”
“The president is really coming to talk about ‘demographic rearmament'”, the boss of environmentalists, Marine Tondelier, said on X (ex-Twitter), asking other tweeters if, too, it reminded them of the science novel dystopian fiction by Margaret Atwood The Scarlet Handmaid, in which women are enslaved to human reproduction. And the Insoumis Alexis Corbière deplored on the same social network: “‘Demographic rearmament’? Women’s bodies are not a weapon… all these vague concepts are worrying.” Spokesperson for the socialist group in the National Assembly, Arthur Delaporte denounced “natalist injunctions”, before questioning: “Women’s rights, a great national cause, really?”