Long Live the Witches of France

On Abortion as a National Right

Yesterday, the French enshrined abortion as a national right. The National Assembly reportedly erupted in “thunderous applause” as 780 members of Parliament voted for a constitutional amendment giving women “guaranteed freedom” to abortion - the first in the world. The Eiffel Tower was illuminated to mark the occasion.

As an American woman living in these brutal times, the two images almost move me to tears. It’s hard for us to imagine a government where a majority of elected national officials thunderously applaud - and then light up a national monument in celebration - this small but profound act of respect for women.

I say “small” not to refer to the act of passing the amendment itself, a global first, but because in a society where women are equal to men, what and how we handle what happens inside our bodies would be, as it actually is, an intensely private, personal matter, absolutely nobody else’s business.

That kind of small.

Instead, we live in a time when our most intimate, more private business is magnified, inspected, and invaded by state power in ways unprecedented and incredible, grotesque and shockingly regressive.

Has there ever been a time in history when women’s most private business was more a matter of state interest than it is today in the United States? From the black-robed judicial warlock Samuel Alito referencing medieval Catholic compendia of witchcraft in his Dobbs decision, to “pronatalist” Elon Musk Xittering canards about the dangers of hormonal birth control on young women, from conservative plots to surveil and track women’s menstrual cycles, to the state of Texas patrolling public roadways to block pregnant women driving out of state to get medical care - we are witnessing the construction of a misogynist dystopia applying 21st Century technology to Old Testament woman-loathing.

Nowhere is this application more visible than the Alabama high court ruling that IVF embryos have the same rights as living humans. It’s interesting that only when their assault on women’s rights suddenly affects the lives and desires of people who can afford high-end fertility treatments - do some Republicans back down on “when life begins.” It was okay to let a poor Black woman nearly bleed out on the floor at home in Florida because doctors were afraid of treating a miscarrying woman under the state’s ridiculous laws. Ohio paleo-lawmakers were just fine forcing a 12-year-old rape victim to carry a precious combination of her own and rapist cells to term in her little girl’s body (after all, it’s not that poor embryo’s fault!).

But when it comes to big money high-tech baby-making, they see a little wiggle room in their definition of the sanctity of all God’s zygotes.

A few days before the French passed their new right, we Americans digested our daily dose of news from the embryo-loving, kooky underworld: Republicans are desperately back-pedaling on the Alabama IVF ruling, but billionaire anti-abortion fanatics are doubling down! Shipping supply magnates Richard “Dick” Uihlein and his wife, Elizabeth “Liz” Uihlein are bankrolling a radical right-wing Alabama judicial candidate. The Uihleins invested their inherited beer money (dad started the workingman Milwaukee brand Schlitz) into a cardboard box company that now trucks stuff around in those cardboard boxes. It’s called U-line - get it? Their wealth skyrocketed to at least $6 billion during the pandemic shipping boom.

What is wrong with these people?

Last week I had an opportunity to sit down with two young conservative men at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, for an article on another subject that will soon be published. The official position of the Heritage Foundation syncs up with the MAGA Republicans on most matters, including support for a national ban on abortion. The men agreed that they were in favor of such a law. I tried a brief appeal to reason. I told them how doctors in New York are nervous and happy not to be working in the forced-birth states because of the crazy restrictions that affect so many aspects of women’s health care. I reminded them that these laws are hurting women who actually want children, but who need medical help.

They were unmoved.

It occurred to me later - and not for the first time - that I didn’t say what I should have said: many men, but especially anti-choice men, suffer from an absolute failure of imagination and compassion when it comes to females. They simply have no idea what a bloody, messy, appalling, terrifying experience it is to be female, to start cramping and bleeding at the age of 13, to get pregnant without wanting to be, to have a complicated pregnancy, to experience labor and to give birth.

They can play warrior video games, but they cannot conceive of what it feels like to have your own body become a war zone. And they don’t want to know. If they do think of these matters, it is with distance and revulsion. As the philosopher Martha Nussbaum has written, disgust is the core, the seed of misogyny.

"I am proud to pay tribute to all the women who have written, have acted, have fought daily so that we can climb the steep slope leading to equality between men and women," said Yaël Braun-Pivet, president of the National Assembly.

The slope is indeed steep, and we are staggering a long way behind, but Vive la France, et merci mes amis for holding a torch ahead, reminding us to keep our eyes beyond this bleak place and on what enlightenment looks like.

READ: French Nobelist Annie Ernaux has written one of the most vivid descriptions of the terrifying ordeal of a botched illegal abortion, in her tiny book Happening. I strongly recommend it.