A feeling of fear lives in me, a fear that is beyond me. An ancestral fear, experienced and transmitted by generations of women. The fear of losing: losing my dignity and my freedom.
Posted yesterday at 11:00 a.m.
I’m a woman, and I’m scared. Not only for me, but also for those who are and those who will be. For all women and young women.
I read Beauvoir, Ernaux, Huston and Arcan. And many others. I believed the battles won, the enemy vanquished, at least in part. Free to enjoy our body, in its entirety and with dignity, including the possibility of refusing unwanted motherhood. Without justification, without in-depth medical examination, without judgement. Maybe I’m just too naive? It is the characteristic of idealists…
I am a woman and I am angry.
They are hundreds of thousands to have fought, to have chanted loud and clear, against all winds and all tides, the end of patriarchy, violence and control of female bodies.
The end of willful blindness. These women fought for an end to this violence perpetrated against a deep intimacy, buried in the heart of women’s bodies, sacred, but too often flouted. Let us recall that the right of women to dispose of their own body and to enjoy it, from which emanates the right to free choice, is fundamental within an egalitarian society. This legal framework allows women to enjoy their sexuality by excluding maternity, to access the freedom of a more complete sexuality by having the possibility of ending an unwanted pregnancy, in complete physical and emotional security.
Because, yes, no offense to some, since the beginning of humanity, women have controlled their fertility. By the use of plants, prolonged breastfeeding, by a good knowledge of their menstrual cycle or other more or less risky techniques. Women resort to abortion and will continue to resort to it, whether it is legal or not, sometimes to the detriment of their health and their lives.
Mother and non-mother
What if we went back to our mythology? To the taboo of the refusal of motherhood or the non-mother. This taboo which refers to Judeo-Christian archetypes, to our great classics: the duality between Mary and Magdalene. The mother and the whore. Always this same paradox, this struggle between Mary, the mother of all mothers, and Mary Magdalene, the whore/the non-mother. The latter, in love with freedom, is a dangerous, even threatening figure for man and the survival of the species. Is it this chimera that haunts us?
Maybe this is a simplistic explanation? I don’t pretend to have the answer, but I’m afraid and fear pushes me to want to understand and explain. It’s a survival instinct. Because I’m scared, I tell you, and I’m not alone…
Thus, I hope that we allow ourselves, collectively, to rehabilitate the experience of abortion at the very heart of the stories lived by women, in all their complexity, their sensitivity and their singularity. And this, beyond the political and ideological debates. To, finally and always, be a subject in its own right.