The United States Supreme Court decided, Friday, June 24, to end the federal authorization for women to resort 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 penalty of abortion in half of the States (according to The Guttmacher Institute, 26 states could prohibit it). It is also catastrophic for American democracy. Noah Feldman, professor of constitutional law at Harvard University, even calls it “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 intrusions state, she now takes care of depriving lawyers. He does not make much doubt, on this side of the Atlantic, that this decision is extreme bad news from any point of view.
However, the apparent unanimity of the convictions 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 sin in a religious and sexist conservatism . First of all, even if it is likely that the deputies will vote in the coming days the registration of the right to abortion in the Constitution, access to voluntary pregnancy interruption in France, is far from being guaranteed equally according to territories and social classes. And the public hospital subdotation makes this access more and more difficult.
Faced with the defense of the right to abortion on Twitter by Damien Abad – questioned for rape by several women and appointed Minister by Elisabeth Borne -, we cannot help but wonder about a possible instrumentalization of this American decision by the government. Could it be, in part, an opportunity to make people 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 the public hospital, or to constitute 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 few debates in France while in the United States, the Antichoix Conservatives have succeeded in making the right to abortion The question determining the left-right divide, seems to invite optimism. It would be tempting to see there the sign that France would respect the right of women much more to have their bodies and to choose for themselves, that many feminist conquests would now be achievements.
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