Abortion could be banned again in the United States. Elementary rights that women and minorities have won are not considered inviolable. You need everyone’s support.
“Time was no longer an imperceptible succession of days (…) it had become something shapeless that was developing in me and that had to be destroyed at all costs,” recalls the French writer Annie Ernaux in the harrowing Text “The Event” to her unwanted pregnancy as a young student, “I didn’t live in the same world anymore. There were the other girls with empty bellies and me.” The year is 1963, abortion is illegal in France and the world that distinguishes it from the rest exists only in speechlessness. Anyone who wants to decide for themselves against the law on the most existential questions can only do so within the tropics of taboos and lies. Those who want to take care of their own bodies must embark on the humiliating, dangerous, precarious quest for secret knowledge and brave accomplices. “And as always in such cases, you didn’t know whether abortions were forbidden because they were reprehensible or reprehensible because they were forbidden.”