Abortion and Contraception: The Most Political of Women's Right

On Thursday 19th September 2024, Geneviève Fraisse, a French philosopher of feminist thought and emeritus research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, delivered the opening lecture of the academic year 2024-25 for Sciences Po’s Gender Studies Programme. She visited the issue of the setbacks in women's emancipation. Returning to the Habeas Corpus, a legal act adopted by the English Parliament in 1679, means returning to “an ancestor of human rights” which sets out a right to the body: 'You Shall Have the Body'. The philosopher understands it through the slogans of feminist struggles in the 20th century: “Our bodies, our selves”, “mon corps m’appartient” in French ["My Body is Mine"].

Democratic and Scientific Ruptures, A Double Revolution

“Abortion and contraception have always existed” notes Geneviève Fraisse. When the Neuwirth and Veil laws, which authorised contraception and decriminalised voluntary termination of pregnancy, were adopted in France in 1967 and 1975, which authorised contraception and decriminalised voluntary termination of pregnancy, it was about “bringing into the realm of law what was previously in the realm of fact or reality.”

By tracing a genealogy of these rights, Geneviève Fraisse identifies two historical ruptures. On one hand, a democratic rupture: the baby boom following World War II called for a new perspective on reproductive health and fertility control. On the other hand, a scientific rupture: science will enable birth control and family planning (invention of the vaginal diaphragm in the 19th century, of the contraceptive pill in 1956, abortion pill in 1982, and the freezing of eggs in the 1980s, etc.). Drawing on reflections initiated in 1998 during a symposium at the Collège de France, Geneviève Fraisse refers to a “Copernican revolution”: a reversal of the representations of the world. “The subject moves to the centre: it is no longer I who revolves around nature, but nature that revolves around me, and I have the choice to use nature to give birth to a child, or not, within the timeframe I choose.” As the French slogan of the time goes: “un enfant si je veux, quand je veux” [A Child if I Want, When I Want].

On the Fragility of the Legal Sphere

Three centuries after the adoption of Habeas Corpus in England, which established the right to one's body as a civil right, how are the rights to contraception and abortion addressed in the legal realm?

Geneviève Fraisse examines the issue of legalisation versus decriminalisation, mentioning the example of the United States of America, where the reversing of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision overturned the constitutional right to an abortion. She also recalls the decriminalisation of abortion in France in 1975, which repealed the penal provisions in the Code pénal [Criminal Code]. It wasn't until 2001 that abortion was no longer governed by the Criminal Code but by the Public Health Code. She also considers the enshrinement in article 34 of the French Constitution of “the freedom guaranteed to women to voluntarily terminate a pregnancy” in March 2024 ; even though the "right to abortion" was replaced by the word "freedom of abortion” in the bill.

To this day, the fundamental rights to contraception and abortion remain civil rights, but this may evolve with future constitutional changes.

Mind and Body: Keys to Emancipation

Between “conquests”, “hesitations”, and “setbacks”, Geneviève Fraisse identifies two barriers to emancipation that can prevent women from “practising equality”.

First, a barrier related to the mind: access to knowledge. She points out that it took until 1924 in France for an identical baccalaureate to be established for both girls and boys. Also, since 2022, women in Afghanistan have been banned from public life, and therefore from schooling.

Secondly, there is a barrier related to the body: it is the – eminently political – right to bodily integrity which facilitates the emancipation and economic autonomy of women, allowing them to be free.

Never forget that women's rights are reversible.

The Power to Give Life

“Access to abortion is not only a matter of rights, it is also a matter of life,” explains Geneviève Fraisse. It involves childbearing and procreation, which lie between privilege and absurdity. Anthropologist Françoise Héritier described it as an “exorbitant privilege” ; while philosopher Simone de Beauvoir refers to it in The Second Sex as “absurd fertility”.

Contraception and abortion are also tied to the concept of biopower, developed by philosophers Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben – a form of power that exerts control over life and governs bodies and populations.

As a final point, Fraisse recalled the title of the Collège de France symposium where she participated in 1998: 'Contraception: Constraint or Freedom?'. Twenty-five years later, this reflection remains relevant, and the concept of the double revolution – a reversal in the representation of the world, with the shift of the subject from the periphery to the centre – remains significant. Women's bodily autonomy is fundamentally a political issue, at the heart of history.

Watch the Lecture Replay

More

In the Sciences Po Library you can access several books by philosopher Geneviève Fraisse translated into English:

• Reason's muse: sexual difference and the birth of democracy. Translated by Jane Marie Todd (University of Chicago Press, 1994)
• A History of Women in the West, Volume 4: Emerging feminism from Revolution to World War. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Series edited by Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot (Harvard University Press, 1993)

As well as book chapters on:

• Setbacks of Women’s Emancipation (Condition, Consequence, Measure and Ruse), in The Trouble with Democracy (Edinburgh University Press, 2016)
• The Difference between the Sexes, a Historical Difference, in Contemporary French Feminism (Oxford University Press, 2004)
• Exclusive Democracy. A French Paradigm. available online and in the book Beyond French feminisms : debates on women, politics, and culture in France, 1981-2001 edited by Roger Célestin, Eliane DalMolin, and Isabelle de Courtivron (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)
• "The deregulation of representations" (the durable muse; copying the nude; s'expliquer; engendering) (L'Harmattan, 2012)