Progressive or reactionary?
(From John Brownie, one of our Briefing readers in Kouvola, Finland.)
Are you a progressive or a reactionary? You have to be one or the other, says Mona Chollet. In the May 2007 English edition of Le Monde diplomatique she wrote an article entitled ‘France's women lose ground’ with the subtitle ‘Abortion and employment rights at risk’ (subscription required to view the full article). She writes from a left-of-centre feminist perspective which seems to divide society simplistically into the “forces of reaction” and the “[forces] of progress”—as if you have to subscribe to the entirety of the ‘progressive’ agenda to avoid being labelled a reactionary.
The main thrust of the article concerns the erosion of abortion rights in France. It assumes abortion is all about a woman's control of her own body:
As Gelly [a doctor and activist for women's rights] said: ‘Women who seek to justify their decision to have an abortion have internalised the fact that it is more acceptable to invoke the welfare of a non-existent child than that of the woman who already exists’. The wave of feminism may have weakened this priority but it was unable to reverse it.
In other words, ‘progress’ is moving away from the traditional view of looking after the welfare of the child to looking at the welfare of the woman (and treating the child as non-existent).
This same attitude towards abortion is evident when Chollet quotes Gisèle Halimi (a lawyer strongly involved in getting abortion legalized in France in 1972): “Europe's abolition of the death penalty was a step forward for civilisation; we should also guarantee abortion rights, which are fundamental to women's freedom”. That is, while capital punishment is wrong (and therefore progress is served by abolishing it), the killing of an unborn child is not wrong but a fundamental part of women's freedom (and therefore progress is served by upholding a woman's right to abort).
But what about guilt and abortion? Chollet doesn't sweep the idea under the carpet but dismisses it in a rather interesting way:
Women also suffer because of the ideological pressure on them and the hostility they experience. Gelly emphasised that although women experience post-natal depression, a condition with well-defined medical characteristics, ‘no one has ever identified any clinical condition of “post-abortion depression”. We systematically overestimate the physical and mental consequences of termination. ’
Chollet is saying that unless there is a clinical condition, it doesn't exist. Therefore post-abortion depression is not as a result of the abortion. If a woman is depressed after having had an abortion, it must be due to the “aura of guilt that surrounds abortion”. Remove the guilt (and the “ideological pressure”), and all is okay.
So am I a progressive or a reactionary? I think I'm both! Although I agree with some of the ‘progressive’ ideals, I can't go all the way with them. But what bothers me the most is that this whole argument is often reduced to name-calling and false dichotomies: either you're ‘progressive’ and you're with us all the way, or you're a hopeless ‘reactionary’ (a word for which my thesaurus gives the following synonyms: “ultraconservative, conservative, Bourbon, extreme right-winger, Colonel Blimp”). Can't we have a more nuanced view of the issue?