Since January 16, Emmanuel Macron’s France has caused uterus. “So”, we might believe that our naughty cousins are seriously copulating, for the pleasure of trifles, because it’s January and we’re frolicking under the covers. But no, we would rather fornicate for the homeland, the uterus having become the weapon of war of “demographic rearmament”.
The head of state – a 46-year-old cisgender man without children, as a reminder – is concerned about infertility and the decline in birth rates against a backdrop of the rise of the right, immigration and concern about languishing pain of the great replacement. The warlike rhetoric associated with the wombs of French women is like hysteria (from the Latin hystericus, “relating to the uterus”), but also of a certain tradition. The best way to defend your Camembert is still the law of numbers. Even ants understand this.
As women tackle the task later and later (in Quebec as in France, moreover), what we call infertility is only a simple law of nature: the more you advance in age and older the difficulty of conceiving increases. Add to that pollution, pesticides and all the shit we swallow, even sperm interested in positive psychology are going around in circles.
A problem that our great-grandmothers did not encounter, subjected young to the “revenge of the cradles” (also called the war of the cradles), a political incitement supported by the Church to turn the tide and populate Quebec with little French speakers born for a little bread, free family labor.
This partly explains why my grandfather Alban was the eldest of a string of twelve children. My grandmother Deleine, one of the eldest of 15 children, had to take care of the youngest. Mother before being a mother. The priests hammered from the pulpit in church that women should not “get in the way of the family”. Notice to the youngest who imagine that the pill, consent and polyamory have always existed: the destiny of women has not always been so fluid.
It is not by giving life, it is by risking his life that man rises above the animal; this is why in humanity superiority is granted not to the sex which engenders, but to that which kills
Hen
No need to have read The second sex to understand that the usefulness of women is still defined by their productivity and that motherhood is very socially encouraged volunteering. We still consider nulliparous women to be selfish, half-finished beings who lack a part of femininity.
From 12 children per woman we have gone to 1.5 in Quebec (1.3 in Canada and 1.68 in France), but the uterus is still considered collective property between the ages of 20 and 40. Let’s just think about surrogacy now permitted in Quebec (surrogacy or pregnancy, still prohibited in France) or the right to abortion, this explosive subject.
We should not be surprised if the “ trad wife », the traditional woman who makes muffins by popping Cipralex, is gaining momentum on TikTok. These young women who look like they came straight out of an episode of What a family ! or Rue des Gables put themselves at the service of the family in pure conservatism.
Quebec Science has just discovered the clitoris (June 2023) and we are still talking about our baggage of eggs. Some sell them to pay for their studies. Because the crux of the matter for women is not children, but education, which allows them to earn a decent salary. The path to motherhood has always weakened us.
“I am always attentive to expressions in everyday language that mean so much more than they seem. It’s like “getting pregnant”. “Falling” comes first! » recently noted the writer Annie Ernaux in an interview given to the magazine Philosophy.
I always warn my young friends of two things: are you ready to raise her alone and do you think you have enough financial strength to do it, man or not? These are not feminist whims, but a reality on the ground. In my entourage, beyond the unconditional love they show, the mothers have all lost it and paid dearly for it with one or two exceptions. And they were silent.
All these Macronists who come to have babies, it disgusts me. They’re loaded to the brim. They grab all the good jobs. You surprise me that Quebecers are worshipful.
Disarming the nation with the pill
Fortunately, more and more young mothers dare to say that motherhood “is crap sometimes”. The comedian Katherine Levac uses this phrase in Postpartumtestimonies from new mothers who debunk certain myths of the “fourth trimester”, which can last for years… Some even dare to write novels with the title Me, Jessica M., 37 years old, mother, unfortunately.
Personally, I would have all aspiring parents read the book by Frenchman Pierre Terzian It’s been a long time since we’ve known each other, inspired by his stay in daycares in working-class areas of Montreal. Hilarious and scathing. The kind of French who hates the French of 21e arrondissement (the overseas department of Plateau), who flee France to breed here.
French feminists, mothers or not, have been going up to the barricades for ten days. The achievements are always to be defended and an episode of The Scarlet Maid is so quickly rebroadcast.
Neoliberalism, exactly. It’s rubbish. My theory is that all these children today are not born out of obligation, like those of my grandmother, who had to populate Quebec with healthy little French speakers, but they are born out of boredom, man. It’s worse. To fill the void. It saves all these cellars from thinking about suicide.
If Justin Trudeau is counting on immigration to repopulate the ranks, in France we are instead calling on French women of childbearing age. Those of the group fighting against gender violence (@noustoutesorg on Instagram) have lined up several fairly common reasons which slow down the desire to have children: simply not wanting to have children, the precariousness of homes and a drop in purchasing power (the prospect of single parenthood, that is!), the mental load which still falls on for women, the ecological crisis for which leaders do nothing, access to housing, and so on, like daycare places…
If the birth rate is falling – in China too – there are reasons which are not just purely financial and which relate to biological, social, and even global factors. Young people do not need a crystal ball to understand that their future is jeopardized by the carelessness of leaders who push them to bring other humans into the world simply to push the economic machine and growth.
If the planet could ask them one question, it would be: do I really need it?