Reading Macron’s speech, I couldn’t understand what the fuss is all about. Why state the bleeding obvious? Why promise to make abortions irreversible?
Abortions are already irreversible, aren’t they? Once you’ve cut a foetus out of the womb, you can hardly put it back, can you? And in general…
At this point my bilingual wife looked over my shoulder and reminded me of another blindingly obvious fact: my French needs work (she used a ruder, ego-crashing expression from which neither my French nor my brittle psyche will ever recover).
Turns out Manny doesn’t want to make abortions irreversible. It was back at that Amiens school that Brigitte, his foster mother cum school mistress cum mistress tout court, taught him they always are. What Manny is after is making the right to abortion irreversible.
To that end he is trying to amend the constitution to include that sacred, sorry, laic, right. And it isn’t as if Manny is being a maverick on this one. He enjoys overwhelming support in both chambers of parliament, the National Assembly and the Senate. They just put a slightly different spin on it.
The wording approved by the National Assembly says that the law should “guarantee the effectiveness of and equal access to the right to voluntary termination of pregnancy”. The Senate coyly modified that to say “the law determines the conditions in which the freedom of women to put an end to their pregnancies is exercised”.
A distinction without a difference, I say. One way or the other, France will become the first country in history to include abortion into the main text of a constitutional document.
Manny delivered a rousing oration evoking an image of Demosthenes and Cicero rolled into one. “Think about it, citoyens and citoyennes,” he said. “Had this constitution existed 46 years ago, when Madame Macron got pregnant, you could be spared my toxic presence.”
Just kidding. What Manny did say was that it’s vitally necessary “to change our constitution in order to engrave the freedom of women to have recourse to the voluntary termination of pregnancy to ensure solemnly that nothing will be able to hinder or to undo what will thus become irreversible.”
The lad does have the gift of the gab, doesn’t he? Compliments to his speechwriters. He also has a knack for political diversion.
For France is in the midst of riots yet again, this time over Manny’s decision to extend the pension age. Giving the citoyens and citoyennes a chance to play with the constitution, Manny hopes, will divert their attention from burning Paris to cinders.
He is in for a let-down on that one. Riots are a ubiquitous presence in French life, side by side with baguettes, chitterling sausages and frog’s legs. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if next “engraved” in the constitution will be “the freedom to have recourse to riots, to ensure solemnly that nothing will be able to hinder or to undo what will thus become irreversible.”
Political shenanigans apart, it’s hard to see the point of this constitutional editing job. Abortions have been legal in France since 1975, without the sanctity of any solemn constitutional endorsement.
Mandatory secularisation, laïcité, goes back even further, to 1905. Originally, it was sold to the public as freedom of religion, though the framers knew that it really meant freedom from religion, which in France more or less meant Catholicism.
That policy has been more successful in promoting atheism than anything Britain has ever done. Going by personal experience, I’ve been known to decline tennis dates on Easter Sunday in both countries, but only in France did such retrograde obtuseness cause much mirth. “Bonnes cloches!” laughed my French partners (“Enjoy your chimes”).
Hence Manny’s pet project seems redundant. Yet in fact, it isn’t. For Manny and his fellow fanatics of wokery the world over were scared witless by the US Supreme Court ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Manny fears that a future conservative government may do what the US Supreme Court did and decentralise abortion laws, leaving them to the discretion of local bodies and provinces. By enshrining abortion in the constitution, he hopes to pre-empt any such outrage, unlikely as it may be.
Perhaps I should say ‘impossible’ rather than ‘unlikely’. For conservatism in our sense of the word doesn’t exist in France. Some individual conservative throwbacks do survive, but they don’t add up to a political force, nor even to a political influence. The mainstream political spectrum in France runs from mild socialism to Trotskyism, leaving conservatism beyond the right margin, and nothing really beyond the left one.
But hey, better safe than sorry. Manny obviously wants to hedge his woke bets.
However, he has been so persuasive that I’m ready to make an exception to my abhorrence of abortion. Perhaps I’d be able to support the post-natal variety, up to the age of, say, 46. Provided that procedure would be performed just once.
“Manny: abortions are irreversible”. The man is a genius I tell you.
For some strange reason my perspective of the French is that they consider themselves to be philosophers on the order of an Aristotle when they make such pronouncements.
Or am I being too cruel?
You are being realistic. Every Frenchman sees himself as a philosopher. Perhaps not quite on the level of Plato or Aristotle, but still. From atomism to Thomism and onwards, they all fit in.
I believe it is already illegal in France to post anything online that suggests a woman should not murder her baby. That is scary. I think we are heading that way in America, such is our fear of “hate speech.”
Saying that amending the constitution is “irreversible” is a lie. If today they can amend their constitution to add a right to murder babies, then tomorrow they can amend it to remove that right. Obviously, such amendments usually go in just one direction, but it is possible. The U.S. constitution was amended to prohibit the production, transport, or sale of alcohol, then 14 years later it was amended to repeal that previous amendment.
Do you think the French saw what happened in America (with the reversal of Roe v. Wade) and, such is their distaste for us in general, that they immediately wanted to go in the opposite direction?
The distaste is there, but I don’t think it’s the motivation in this case. Manny is simply trying to score woke political points and, as I said, divert attention from the pension age protests. You are of course right: nothing in any constitution is ever irreversible. But Manny and his ilk aren’t about the fine points of political sense, the fine points of anything, come to that.