Isabelle Nanty did not always have a happy and fulfilled life as a woman. More than thirty years ago, the actress popularized by
Visitors
,
The Tuches
or the series Munch
had to face a terrible diagnosis: an infertility for which no treatment was possible to give her hope of the possibility of one day becoming a mother. After long melancholy years, Isabelle Nanty managed to move forward, and in 2004 adopted little Tallulah, a young girl of Chinese origin then aged two, and who is now twenty-two. In a podcast by Alexandre Mars, the 62-year-old actress returned to her infertility, which she owes despite herself to her mother, who also bequeathed it to her other daughter, Astrid.
“My mother had miscarriages and to be able to keep her children, there was a product called Distilbene. Twenty years later, it was discovered that children born from this product were sterile. I found out in 1993 because my sister was undergoing medical treatment and discovered she was infertile. He said to her: Do you have a sister? I would like to see her. So, that’s when I did a fertility test and found out. I was 30, and at 35, I was in menopause“ explained, always moved, Isabelle Nanty, who had to undertake a long work on herself to “mourn” of this illegitimate child that she will never have.
A “half-woman” and therapy for grieving
After many years of feeling unfair, Isabelle Nanty decided to go to therapyin order to come to the end of his mourning, to pave the way for adoption: “I started by doing therapy to grieve the loss of biological motherhood and when I was sure that this mourning of biological motherhood was over, I began the steps to adopt because I had not given up on being mother. When I was a child, I loved going to see the babies who had just been born, I had billions of dolls and I played mother so I couldn’t give up.”
Laborious work on herself, Isabelle Nanty being convinced of being a “half-woman” which could not please a man: “I had to assimilate two things at the same time because I had just been left and I learned at the same time that I would not be able to have children. I had to recover from these two shocks. Above all, I experienced myself as half-woman and as someone who cannot promise much to a man.“.
The Distilbene children’s scandal
Now banned for sale, diethylstilbestrol was a synthetic diphenol with powerful estrogenic properties, prescribed to pregnant women in France between 1948 and 1977, to prevent possible miscarriages. Over the years, many genital anomalies have been noted by mothers who have used this treatment. The Distilbène children’s scandal makes headlines in the media: among girls, genital malformations associated with risks of vaginal and uterine cancer are highlighted, just like many cases of sterility. In boys, stenoses and malformations of the urethra, cysts, undescended testicles, hypotrophies of the latter or even a reduction in sperm quality are mentioned. If the doctor was banned from the end of the 70s, the effects on children Distilbene are unfortunately irreversible. Isabelle Nanty and her sister are…