While, at the beginning of the XXe century, abortion was repressed in metropolitan France against a backdrop of pro-natalist policies, and it was encouraged by the authorities on the island of Réunion after 1945. These practices shed light on the construction of biopower at the intersection of gender, class and race.
Since 2015, the question of access to voluntary termination of pregnancy (IVG) is experiencing new news. In 2015 and 2016, the questioning of this right provoked demonstrations in several European countries, such as Poland and Spain. The recent death of Simone Veil, who in 1975 had carried the law decriminalizing abortion, has given rise to multiple tributes, some from former adversaries, from “entrepreneurs of the fight” against the right toIVGto use the expression used by Fabrice Cahen in his book Governing Morals. The Fight Against Abortion in France, 1890-1950At the same time, Françoise Vergès’ book, The belly of women. Capitalism, racialization, feminismrecalls that forced abortions took place in Reunion in 1970.
A thesis and an essay
These two works seek to describe two opposing modalities of public action. Fabrice Cahen’s book describes the politicization of abortion against a backdrop of pronatalist politics, then the construction and reinforcement of repressive legislation. Conversely, Françoise Vergès reveals the way in which abortion was encouraged by public authorities on the island of La Réunion, to the point that doctors considered it legitimate to perform non-consensual abortions.
These two studies, however, have different projects. Fabrice Cahen’s work is based on a thesis defended in 2011, and his argument is based on broad and varied documentation. His work constitutes a “model for analyzing the construction of public problems” (p. 11). In an already well-marked historiographical field, he proposes a historical investigation that favors the perspective of the State (p. 25) and seeks to understand which networks worked to politicize the issue, their motivations and their means. Françoise Vergès also seeks to decenter the gaze, showing how the observation of policies carried out in the DOM–TOM reveals the persistence of a colonial thought of bodies, particularly women’s bodies. His work, “deliberately hybrid, because it does not claim to belong to any discipline and is not part of academic research” (p. 22), is based essentially on a corpus of press articles and public reports.
A documented essay and an academic thesis, the two works have in common the question of the construction of a biopower, that is to say the development of a power exercised over the life and body of populations. Their cross-reading allows to highlight all the gap that could have existed between the natalist discourse developed in the metropolis and the encouragement of birth control advocated in the former colonies.
Limit or encourage births
These works place the issue of abortion in the long term. For Fabrice Cahen, we can distinguish 3 phases: the “soft prohibition” (1890-1939), during which the anti-abortion nebula sought to obtain a more rigorous application of the law and its modification; the “radicalization” of the actors (1939-1945), who won their case with the public authorities to increase repression; finally, the abandonment of all-repression and the development of new tools of struggle after the Liberation. Françoise Vergès’s discussion focuses on the following period and the birth control policies implemented in the DOM–TOM in the 1960s-1970s.
Between 1890 and the 1930s, abortion was gradually constructed as an object deserving political debate, through lobbying and questioning of public authorities by several actors, including the National Alliance for the Growth of the French Population founded in 1896. This nebula of doctors and lawyers, crossed by different sensibilities, proposed several solutions: either act upstream of the abortion by financially supporting families and relying on the moral conscience of couples, or repress abortion more severely by toughening the law. F. Cahen studies the development of these discourses that seek to bring abortion into public opinion and political debate.
For his part, F. Vergès traces the history of a politics of bodies in the DOM–TOMand the emergence of the motif of “development” on women’s bodies. As early as the 1950s, in the wake of Inspector Jean Finance’s report, governments adopted the idea of ”overpopulation” on the island of La Réunion, which should be resolved by birth control or “exporting the population” (sic). These speeches obscure the causes of the health and social state of the island, a product of the colonial past and the abandonment of public authorities.
The discourses denouncing or promoting abortion have in common a rhetoric of urgency based on the promotion of figures. The struggle entrepreneurs described by F. Cahen insist on the urgency of a situation that leads them to put forward the fallacious figure of 500,000 abortions per year. This “cry of alarm” aims to transform terminations of pregnancy into “non-births”, and to impose the idea that abortion is the main factor in the depopulation of France (p. 79). We find the same type of rhetoric among those who, a few years later, evoke the “galloping demography”, the “demographic flood” of the island of La Réunion. This insistence on volume masks the phenomenon of rebalancing of the birth rate linked to the end of slavery and the lowering of the mortality rate. The fertility of women on La Réunion is presented as a threat, with figures to support it (p. 114-115).
Biopolitics at the Intersection of Class, Gender and Race
Both works invite us to reflect on what motivates public action in terms of birth control or encouragement. F. Cahen shows that anti-abortion entrepreneurs link the vitality of the nation to its birth rate, associating patriotism and family commitment, to the point of equating the abortionist with a traitor to the homeland, guilty to the point of deserving death. Added to this patriotic concern is the concern to maintain a sexual order in which women’s bodies are controlled, in a context of “moral panic” and “anti-feminist panic” (p. 60) that are expressed on several occasions. But controlling women’s bodies can also result in the confiscation of their procreative capacity: in Réunion, this takes the form of forced abortions and sterilizations.
The link between patriotism and demography reveals in the background that certain populations are considered useless: those who are encouraged or forced to have birth control. In metropolitan France, it is the support of a large family model; in the DOM–TOMthe incentive to reduce births. F. Vergès sees in this the persistence of a colonial thought at the very heart of the story of decolonization, which hierarchizes the value of populations and abandons some to their fate, and this since 1946 (p. 70-71). The forced abortions of the 1970s are the consequence of a racist vision of the Reunion population, described by the public authorities as irresponsible.
F. Cahen and F. Vergès agree that these body policies primarily affect the most precarious. Most of the women condemned for abortion under Vichy came from working-class backgrounds (F. Cahen, p. 302); those from La Réunion turned to free medical assistance due to lack of resources (F. Vergès, p. 29). An intersectional analysis thus highlights the differentiated effects of public action according to class, race and gender. These elements influence the multiplicity of actors who construct and apply these body policies.
Civil society and public action
The investigations of Fabrice Cahen and Françoise Vergès take us into the interstices of democracy, these areas in which decisions are made without recourse to popular consultation. The anti-abortion nebula described by F. Cahen develops different modes of action: petition, literature, image, questioning of deputies, who finally lead a “parliamentary coup” to impose in 1920 the law requested by the lobbyists (p. 176). F. Vergès describes operating rules that differ from those of the metropolis, between censorship, repression of demonstrations and collusion between the wealthy and political power (p. 43). This context fostered Doctor Moreau’s feeling of impunity: the latter enriched himself through multiple forced abortions and sterilizations, from which he diverted reimbursements from social assistance.
Both works highlight the multiplicity of types of actors interested in the construction and application of body policies. F. Cahen analyzes the links that unite doctors, lawyers, parliamentarians, family and feminist associations, but also all those who are responsible for applying the laws: judges, police officers, midwives, the health and social world in the broad sense. Within this world, there is no consensus about the means to combat abortion, which explains the ineffectiveness of the policies implemented. For example, the refusal to lift medical confidentiality remains a controversial subject throughout the period 1880-1950.
F. Vergès also depicts this medico-social world and the growing role of social workers noted by F. Cahen from the 1950s. She recalls in particular that the DDASSconvinced of its civilizing mission, took children from their families to send them to mainland France between 1963 and 1982. Both reveal the difficulty in precisely drawing the line between the civil sphere and the State. Public action is polymorphous (F. Cahen, p. 371) and often relies on private funds and initiatives, on the communication media of anti-abortion associations. In Réunion, David Moreau is at once a doctor, a political leader (mayor, general councilor) and an economic leader (p. 46). It is very difficult to discern where public action begins and ends in terms of body politics.
Finally, the works of Fabrice Cahen and Françoise Vergès constitute an invitation to reflect on the conditions for the effectiveness of public action in terms of birth control or encouragement. For F. Vergès, it is the persistence of racist representations that led the public authorities to cover up and encourage forced abortions. The discourse on “development” masked the hierarchization of populations and its direct consequences, the violence suffered by women in Reunion in the 1970s. The grand narrative of decolonization led to a “process of collective erasure” of the experience lived by these populations, even in the memories of activists and feminists.
F. Cahen draws up a contrasting assessment of the successes and failures of the fight against abortion between 1880 and 1950: if the repressive laws did not manage to reduce it significantly, the entrepreneurs of the fight succeeded in imposing the idea that it was a public problem; the battle of representations of the imagination was won, in the absence of that of practices.