Lhe Supreme Court of the United States decided, Friday, June 24, to put an end to the federal authorization for women to have recourse to abortion. This decision is a disaster for women and for anyone who has a uterus, and who may need an abortion in the United States, because it opens the door to the criminalization of abortion in half of the States (according to the Guttmacher Institute, 26 states could ban it). It is also catastrophic for American democracy. Noah Feldman, professor of constitutional law at Harvard University, even calls it a “institutional suicide” on the part of the Supreme Court, as it calls into question its legitimacy: instead of guaranteeing the rights of individuals against possible state intrusions, it now takes care of depriving people of their rights. There is little doubt on this side of the Atlantic that this decision is extremely bad news by any measure.
However, the apparent unanimity of the condemnations of this decision in France should not hide a more complex reality than the simplistic image of a feminist country, against the United States which would sink into religious and sexist conservatism. First of all, even if it is probable that the deputies will vote in the next few days to include the right to abortion in the Constitution, access to voluntary termination of pregnancy in France is far from being guaranteed equally according to territories and social classes. And the under-staffing of the public hospital makes this access more and more difficult.
In addition, faced with the defense of the right to abortion on Twitter by Damien Abad – implicated for rape by several women and appointed minister by Elisabeth Borne –, one cannot help but wonder about a possible instrumentalization of this American decision by the government. Could this be, in part, an opportunity to forget the accusations of sexual violence against three members of the government, Mr. Abad, Gérald Darmanin and Chrysoula Zacharopoulou? It is undoubtedly less expensive to include abortion in the Constitution than to invest massively in public hospitals, or to set up an exemplary government on sexual violence.
In addition to these political considerations, the fact that the right to abortion seems to be the subject of very little debate in France, whereas in the United States, anti-choice conservatives have succeeded in making the right to abortion the determining issue. the left-right divide seems to invite optimism. It would be tempting to see this as a sign that France would respect women’s right to control their bodies much more and to choose for themselves, that a number of feminist achievements would henceforth be taken for granted.
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