“This bad weather for women announces a disillusioned tomorrow”

Lhe annulment of the right to abortion decided on June 24 by the American Supreme Court is a terrible signal for the situation of women. In the United States, their rights are therefore being unraveled, with the support of the main institutions.

As early as 1993, the visionary Susan Faludi announced in her essay Backlash. The cold war against women (Des Femmes-Antoinette Fouque, 1993), this political backlash after the important but still fragile progress achieved by the feminist movements of the 1970s, thanks to which women came out of their silence.

This step back is quite retrograde in the strong sense of the term, because it refers to times of great distress for women. In the France of the 1950s and 1960s, clandestine abortions were synonymous with suffering, even death, for thousands of women. A very present risk even today, when 47,000 die every year in the world following an unsafe abortion, while the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations (UN) recommend that the Abortion is a safe procedure for women.

We also remember the textbook case of Romania, when President Nicolae Ceausescu banned abortion: between 1966 and 1989, more than ten thousand women died during clandestine abortions and many children were abandoned. in overcrowded orphanages, left to fend for themselves, without care. Even today, Americans highlight the benefits of their adoption system: why abort when everything is done so that we can adopt children born and then abandoned?, argue the judges of the Supreme Court.

A decline in Europe

Tackling abortion is not exclusive to America. Many political leaders, more or less authoritarian, are working on it all over the world, often with a religious bias.

The decline is thus again perceptible on the European continent. In 2013, the Spanish government reversed the right to abortion and Spanish women can now only terminate a pregnancy under two conditions, in the event of endangering the health of the woman or rape. Here again, for associations defending women’s rights, this decision is a step back thirty years, Spain de facto returning to legislation dating from 1985.

Portugal decided in 2015 to de-reimburse abortion, also requiring women to undergo psychological follow-up. This law was voted under the pressure of a powerful movement, baptized “For the right to be born”. Portuguese feminists denounce a return to clandestine abortion and criticize the presence of anti-abortion doctors in medical consultations, aimed at controlling women and manipulating their freedom of choice.

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