A year earlier the Supreme Court of the United States, with a conservative majority, had decided to reverse the sentence Roe vs. Wade, in office for fifty years. In the process, nearly half of the country’s states chose to enact restrictive laws to hinder, or outright ban, their citizens’ right to abortion.
And in Europe? Are our reproductive and sexual rights under threat? Should we fear for our access to abortion, contraception, quality sex education? In a new documentary available for free access on YouTube, Esther Meunier and Marie de Brauer return to this climate of uncertainty and paint a hopeful portrait of those who struggle daily to assert or regain our rights.
To miss. What was the genesis of the project?
Esther Miller. This is a project that started about five years ago. At the time, I was working as a journalist for to miss and had edited a series of reports in various countries where the right to abortion was illegal or threatened. We had planned a last part in the United States, where we felt a certain fragility… Then, Covid hindered this project. In 2022, the repeal of Roe vs. Wade acted as a catalyst for me. I knew I had to take this project in hand and bring it to fruition.
Why did you choose this quote from Simone de Beauvoir, “ You will need to be vigilant as the title of your documentary?
Because it perfectly sums up the challenge of the documentary. It symbolizes this urge to remember that, if the situation is getting worse in many places, it can get better as long as we don’t let our guard down. THE knockback that we observe does not date back to yesterday. Let’s not minimize it, but let’s not overestimate it either.
Today, what needs to be remembered is this form of new offensive, this outburst of survival that we observe in a multitude of places. This is why we wanted to show the faces of these activists, who struggle daily to regain our rights, to say that it is possible to join them, to mobilize alongside them.
Paxton Smith, the Texan activist I interview in the documentary, says it very well: things will get better, but first they will get much worse. That doesn’t mean the battle is lost beforehand. Far from there. He keeps hoping.
Do you draw a parallel between abortion rights, LGBTQIA+ rights, women’s rights… Why is this important?
Everything is connected. Together these rights form what is known as sexual and reproductive rights”. Groups that attack one quickly attack the others. Whether they start by attacking contraception or trans rights doesn’t matter: their overall political agenda is, in any case, based on racist dynamics and a goal of cis-heterosexual patriarchal hegemony.
The European Parliamentary Forum shows this well in its reports: there is a constellation of organizations in Europe that work together to promote an ultra-conservative vision of what our societies should be like.
We must pay attention to the signals sent by some political parties (such as the National Gathering) in terms of sexual and reproductive rights, which hide behind pro-natalist arguments.
In the documentary you show that people have always had abortions and that others have always wanted to prevent them…
Yes, it’s a historical reminder: you can never ban abortion, you will only ban safe abortion. Activists who claim to be pro-life are anything but: their actions endanger the health and lives of others. Sometimes it is less risky to have an abortion than to carry a pregnancy to term!
If this debate ever existed, how does the repeal of Roe vs. Is Wade a game changer?
One cannot overlook the role of the cultural model proposed by the United States, nor the considerable influence of soft power American. Repeal of Roe vs. Wade has given a kind of legitimacy to other governments around the world: seeing that a right thought to be inalienable could be so easily undermined in the United States lends weight to those who refuse to legalize it at home, or who wish to roll it back. We see it in Poland or Hungary, where restrictive laws have multiplied in recent months.
Hazal Atay, a gender policy researcher in Turkey who we interview in the documentary says it well: a model that once existed somewhere inspires other countries to do the same. This means that it is crucial to allow for positive role models to exist. France, which proposes to constitutionalize the right to abortion, is going in the right direction: it is a strong example, which says that we consider access to abortion an inalienable right.
The documentary “You will have to stay vigilant” is available on the Esther Reporter YouTube channel and in the form of excerpts published regularly on the Instagram and Tik-Tok accounts @estherreporter and @mariedebr.
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Source: Madmoizelle
Mary Crossley is an author at “The Fashion Vibes”. She is a seasoned journalist who is dedicated to delivering the latest news to her readers. With a keen sense of what’s important, Mary covers a wide range of topics, from politics to lifestyle and everything in between.
