They will never stop aborting

When the news broke I felt like Charlton Heston in the movie’s final scene The Planet of the Apesmore than in The Scarlet Maid by Margaret Atwood.

When he understands that humanity destroyed the Earth with the atomic bomb by seeing the remains of the Statue of Liberty, when he thought he was on another planet. “The bastards, they did it. Damn them all! I won’t repeat to you all the church words and the saints that I sent down from heaven on St. John’s Day, because it happened on that day.

It only took a few ultra-conservative Supreme Court justices to overturn Roe v. Wade and set back women’s right to abortion by 50 years. So young women of childbearing age today in the United States have fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers. In my lifetime, I have never seen such a setback in a democratic country that has long been considered the vanguard of progress. I approach menopause feeling almost lucky to have access to infertility, in this darkening world for women, from Afghanistan to our immediate neighbors.

I had an abortion in my life and I rode in a Cadillac. It was done by a professional and super nice doctor, trained by Henry Morgentaler, who listened to jazz while I was floating on a painkiller, and my boyfriend, who is still the same today, held my hand. Everything went well, and since then, I haven’t once cried at night telling myself that I could have been a mother. I never felt ashamed of my choice, which was respected. I came at the right time, since abortion in Canada was only legalized in 1988.

My grandmother and my aunt were not so lucky. They were very good friends, and performed abortions themselves, not to avoid a scandal, but because they didn’t want any more children, after having had several. My grandmother found herself in the hospital bleeding, the doctor absolutely wanted her to give him the name of her abortionist, which she refused to do, to protect her friend. They could have ended up in prison, on the sole accusation of the doctor, who ignored them. They told all this without any shame to their daughters, and I admired them a lot for that.

Women have always had recourse to abortion and they will continue to do so, whether they are prohibited from doing so or not. They will never stop refusing to have an unborn child imposed on them. Whether it comes from a rape or a crazy night of sex.

The ban only takes America back to the days when women were dying to have abortions with whatever means at hand.

I can never have words harsh enough for those suckers in the Supreme Court who decided this. Let someone come and tell me about the danger woke now, because this historical slippage certainly does not come from there. Go read the journalist Chris Hedges who wrote, in 2007, American Fascists – The Christian Right Assaults America (published in French by Lux last year), about the influence of the American evangelical radical right, which supported Donald Trump as an envoy of God. He also believes that during the assault on the Capitol, what united the attackers was Christian fascism. “This attack is just one example of the anti-democratic ethos embodied by the Christian right, which includes the celebration of gun culture,” he explains in the introduction to the book, which was written in 2021. “When these people talk about re-creating ‘traditional values,’ what they’re really talking about is restoring white supremacy,” he says. This is what they are nostalgic for; white patriarchy. Mega-churches are patriarchal organizations run by white men. The latter only give a religious veneer to the hyper-masculinity that defines all forms of fascism. »

Let’s face it, it’s the women of the most vulnerable communities who will suffer the most from this decision, because a white judge will always have the means to send his mistress to New York for an abortion.

I can’t believe that American women will have to take up the torch for a fundamental right that saves women’s lives, and that we hoped acquired. But I’m hopeful that they will, because they don’t have a choice anymore – they really do.

Must see the documentary The Janes, by Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes, recently produced by HBO, to understand what American women are in danger of returning to. It is a moving portrait of a small group of seven women activists who decided between 1968 and 1973 to provide safe and affordable abortions – we gave what we could – through a network clandestine. You had to call “Jane” at a number. They came to pick you up at a specific place, they had found places to perform abortions. They had learned how to do this from a man named Mike, a rather nice man who had learned about the intervention of a doctor himself, and who made more money performing abortions than working in construction. “It was my best medical experience and it was illegal,” says one of these women, who remembers the contempt and lack of solidarity of many doctors at the time. “We were ordinary women trying to save women’s lives. We wanted each woman who contacts us to be the heroine of her own story”, summarizes a Jane. Between 1968 and 1973, the Janes provided approximately 11,000 abortions.

The Janes ended up being exposed – and the story of the cops who weren’t quite sure what to do with it is worth the detour – but they avoided prison for the simple reason that in 1973 abortion became legal and that the charges fell. Saved by the bell, practically.

There is no doubt that women will not hesitate to recreate clandestine networks, if necessary, which is appalling. But what worries me is the current context. The right to abortion arrived in the wake of progressive movements, it’s a bit like saying to ourselves “we’ve come to this”, and public opinion was favourable. Right now, there are Christian right-wing freaks who are going to make a point of zealously enforcing the law, because they just won a fight, and their agenda won’t stop there. We don’t do all this to become lax. The fight will be fierce, and in a context where American women have more freedom to carry a weapon than to carry a child or not, how far will they go to defend their rights and their future? In my thoughts, I’ve come to this, I’m so angry.