The “time of fear” has returned, writes novelist Siri Hustvedt on the New York site “Literary Hub” after the US Supreme Court revoked the constitutional right to abortion. “The time of protest too”, she warns, applying herself to deconstructing, one by one, the misogynistic fantasies about procreation.
[Cet article est extrait de notre numéro spécial “Nous les femmes”, dédié à des paroles d’autrices sur la condition des femmes à travers le monde.]
In 1972, abortion was illegal in Minnesota. One day that year (the exact date faded from my memory), a 21-year-old young man drove his terrified 16-year-old girlfriend to a women’s medical center in Minneapolis. He dropped her there to take a pregnancy test and left.
The girlfriend was me. There were no home pregnancy tests back then. I still haven’t digested the cowardice of the boyfriend, but, more than anything, I remember my fear, my confusion and the weight of secrecy that enveloped my possible state.
Without hesitation, “I would have broken the law”
My mind was captured by clandestine abortions. I had seen some of the results in poor quality black and white photos: the corpses of young women bathed in their blood, on couches or filthy stretchers. I imagined myself in a grim room with an unknown man and his tray of filthy instruments.
I had no money of my own. If I had been pregnant – which was not the case after all – my boyfriend or my parents would have had to finance the abortion. I’m sure they would have found the funds, even though none of them were rolling in gold and I felt sick at the thought of my dad knowing about my pregnancy. It was unrealistic to take a flight to New York [où l’IVG a été légalisé en 1970] and scrape together the hundreds of dollars the procedure cost, but I would never have carried a pregnancy to term. I would have broken the law.
Sixteen years later, I gave birth to my daughter, Sophie. When I expelled her from my body, I felt a state of ecstasy that was unknown to me until then and that I have not experienced since. I have in mind that childbirth takes place in a thousand ways. That’s how mine happened. This child was infinitely desired.
Years later, after the end of her higher education, when she had taken her independence, Sophie called me. I heard in his voice that it was wrong. She mentioned a medical problem. I immediately thought that she suffered from an incurable disease. I prepared for the worst. When she told me she was pregnant, I was so relieved that I laughed. She remembers better than I what I answered her: “You are in New York. The decision is yours. If you want to have an abortion, it is possible.” She made the choice of abortion and has never regretted it.
“It’s fear time again”
In 1973, a year after I feared I might be pregnant, the Supreme Court’s Roe vs Wade legalized – for almost fifty years – abortion throughout the United States. The Supreme Court has now abolished the constitutional right to abortion. It is again the time of fear and the time to react to this fear by protesting, by speaking out against this court decision and by dislodging, through the ballot box, the radical and anti-democratic politicians.
Legislating on procreation and restricting reproductive rights has always been, and remains today, the hallmark of authoritarian and fascist regimes. In Nazi Germany, abortion was strictly forbidden to Aryan women, who had the duty to procreate for the Reich. Exceptional courts in Germany and Vichy France were empowered to pronounce the death penalty in the case of illegal terminations of pregnancy. In Mussolini’s Italy, informing about contraception was an offence. Abortion, already illegal in the country, was then accompanied by heavier penalties. In Spain, in 1941, Franco officially made abortion a crime against the state.
In Poland, the ultra-right-dominated Constitutional Court has gradually tightened the country’s already restrictive abortion laws. At the end of 2021, fearing it was illegal, doctors refused to remove a deceased twin from a woman’s womb. She fell seriously ill, but they maintained their refusal to intervene, even though Polish law reserves the right to abort in cases where the mother’s life is in danger. It wasn’t until two days after the second fetus died in utero that doctors terminated the pregnancy. On January 25, this woman died, identified only as Agnieszka T.
In Hungary, the government of Victor Orban, like many American states, has multiplied the obstacles between the person seeking to obtain an abortion and the procedure itself. They know that, in this case, every moment counts.
On the perversity of “originalism”
The United States is now subservient to a violently undemocratic Supreme Court. It’s not new. For most of its existence, the Court has opted for a narrow interpretation of the formula which opens the preamble to the American Constitution. “We the people”, implied “white men and landlords”.
This, after all, was the original premise of the framers of the Constitution. the “we” as they understood it did not include women, indigenous people, blacks, Asians, Catholics or Jews. It can be argued that the United States only resembled a democracy in 1965, with the Voting Rights Act, when black people gained the effective right to vote. When the Supreme Court struck down much of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, it reversed the regular extension of the definition of “we”.
Originalism, a perverse legal doctrine which made its way in the 1970s and which is today in the majority in the Supreme Court, is fundamentally reactionary. This theory holds that the supreme law should be interpreted according to its “objective” public meaning at the time of its writing, i.e. in 1787 [année de l’adoption de la Constitution américaine].
Originalism is a legal philosophy underpinned by immobility, which reifies one or more historical moments. The authority must also take into account the amendments and the time of their drafting as well as the jurisprudence, but it largely ignores the dynamics of history and its evolutions.
The fantasy of the “homunculus” and the “mother ship”
Fixed categories and strict borders are the fundamentals of the extreme right. In the draft, which leaked, and then in the final version of the Supreme Court’s opinion revoking the Roe decision vs Wade, Judge Samuel Alito repeatedly and indiscriminately uses the expression “the unborn child”, which encompasses all phases of gestation, from the zygote (the fertilized diploid cell) to the embryo, then to