The recent judgment of the US Supreme Court stripping women of the constitutional protection of the right to abortion represents one of the most violent attacks on their dignity and freedom that American women have experienced in decades. By abandoning their bodies to the legal guerrilla warfare led by evangelical Christians in many states, this abject judgment lowers women to the level of animality, on an equal footing, no longer with men, but with mice. , cats and female dogs.
Posted at 9:00 a.m.
Biology, an essential element of the “situation” of women
From Condorcet in France to Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill in England, “custom” or the lack of education of women has always been invoked to explain their inferiority. Thus the proposed solution lay in compulsory education and coeducation in education, so that girls could benefit from the same lessons and the same chances of social advancement as boys.
This will be one of the great lessons of Second sex by Simone de Beauvoir, who, from the first chapter of her book, insists on the decisive importance of biology in the lives of women and on the need to be able to control their fertility so that this biology does not become a fixed destiny, where girls and women undergo repeated pregnancies and give birth without having chosen it.
While in other mammals the estrous cycle only takes place for one season, in women it takes place every month, so that “from puberty to menopause, women are the seat of a story that takes place in her and which does not concern her personally”. “Without respite,” de Beauvoir would say, “woman outlines the work of gestation. “These biological data are of extreme importance: they play a leading role in the history of the woman, they are an essential element of her situation. »
The right to abortion to give birth freely
This is why there can be no freedom and equality for women without rational control of their fertility and social responsibility for it, i.e. free access to contraception, state-guaranteed abortion and child care, to allow women to decide whether or not they want a child, when they will have children and how many children they want.
Because what can it mean for a woman to pursue higher education, get a job and have a career, if she risks becoming pregnant every month without having wanted to?
Honestly, what man is in such a situation? None, whereas it is the lot of every woman.
Controlling one’s body is the foundation of one’s freedom and denying this right to women, as all religions do, is to force them to give birth against their will, to lower them to being nothing but laying hens in the service of the family, the community or the nation, whatever, and prevent them from entering humanity on an equal footing. The scandal is there. The unacceptable is there, because women are simply not animals! And if female dogs and cats, stuck in their hair and their animality, give birth in repetition and unconsciousness, women are, on the other hand, historical beings, with a conscience, desires, projects and a will to live. freely, like men.
“Tosca, you make me forget God! »
This little phrase from Scarpia who fantasizes about Tosca’s body in Puccini’s opera sums up beautifully the glaring opposition between sexual pleasure and heaven. This explains why all religions are obsessed with sex, whose powerful force of attraction they fear. He is their worst enemy because he drives away from God and ruins interest in the other world. To limit sexual pleasure to strict reproduction and to condemn all that deviates from it, such is the fundamental intention of all religion.
We must therefore see these patriarchal ideologies as being a formidable device for controlling sexuality, particularly that of women, who occupy a central position with regard to reproduction.
To achieve such a narrowing of sexuality, religions must force women into motherhood and suppress any sexual life that aims only for pleasure. This is why religions condemn contraception, abortion and homosexual marriage, while they promote the morality of the wife and the mother as a guarantee of fulfillment and emancipation for women. Should we then be surprised that contraception and same-sex marriage are now in the crosshairs of the conservative judges of the American Supreme Court?
Women, animals?
What emanates from this judgment is downright despicable because women are humiliated and stripped of their humanity. While we rightly denounce the mistreatment of pets and demand the closure of pet stores to put an end to puppy mills, evangelical Christians want to ban contraception and abortion to turn women into factories. to babies. Welcome to the brave new world!