By revoking the foundations of case law Roe v. wade, the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States recently recognized that abortion is not a constitutional right. This volte-face has since galvanized opponents of this controversial decision (who played a major role in the midterm elections in the United States), but also the religious and conservatives who want to maintain this momentum to question the interruptions pregnancy elsewhere in the West.
It is at the heart of these sociological upheavals that the Frenchwoman Pauline Harmange publishes her new essay, Aborted. An intimate story, a political choice, in which she breaks the silence on her own experience which she describes as painful and traumatic.
The essayist had already caused a thunderbolt in 2020 by publishing at 25 Me men, I hate them (Editions du Seuil). The young feminist activist then emerged from the shadows with this work with its provocative title and content, which caused a lot of ink to flow, both among supporters of the conservative right and among certain feminists who criticized her for her radicalism.
The highly publicized reception of her first novel did not dampen Harmange, who persisted and signed with her essay in which she returned to her termination of pregnancy which she experienced at the age of 24. In her book, she recounts with open heart in an intimate story her decision to abort at home using abortion pills. An experience that will haunt her for a long time. Having fallen pregnant in precariousness, the reasons for this termination of pregnancy will have been economic, she writes, but the consequences will be numerous on her physical and mental health, overwhelmed by sadness and loneliness.
Although Pauline Harmange never questions the right of women to have an abortion, she nevertheless tries to understand “all the meaning of a decision taken in a flash and which has never ceased to be the right one”. The objective of her work, the most difficult to write of her entire life, she indicates, is not to give weapons to anti-choice, but to speak openly and without taboos about abortion and its repercussions on the “body” and the “head”. She strives to extract herself from a discourse that she describes as binary and patriarchal, explaining that abortion can also be a real loss for many women.
The author also mentions the dilemma of having an abortion in the West “because in the twenty-first century one should be proud of all that one has won, even if it twists one’s stomach”. She also assures that no one wants to hear from aborted women and that in any case, she writes, many women do not speak freely about this traumatic experience. “What happens in our bellies and in our heads when we choose not to be pregnant anymore is still too dirty, too creepy and too shameful. Of course, every abortion is unique and not all women react the same way, she points out. It is therefore from her experience that she tries to give voice to all those who have suffered, just like her, in silence.