Abortion – a law guaranteeing it, but more importantly access to this right – is one of the central issues (and not the only one) in the struggle for gender equality and the protection and progress of sexual and reproductive health. While it is legal everywhere in Europe, this right is often very limited (Poland or Malta) or exists only on paper (in some regions it is extremely difficult to find doctors who perform abortions).
Last April, the European Parliament voted on a resolution calling for abortion to be inscribed in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights: 336 MEPs voted in favor (including 40 conservative MEPs from the European People’s Party), 163 against, and 39 abstained.
Who voted against this resolution? Most of the MEPs from European Conservatives and Reformists (which includes most of the sovereignist and far-right parties, such as Fratelli d’Italia, Law and Justice in Poland, Vox in Spain) and Identity and Democracy (which includes the right-wing parties missing from the previous list).
What does the resolution mean for women? In practice, little. “If we inscribe abortion in the Charter of Fundamental Rights, we will give women the possibility to appeal to European courts.” says Céline Thiebault-Martinez, president of the French coordination of the European Women’s Lobby, in Public Senat. These are, of course, time-consuming and demanding procedures. Instead, the inscription is highly symbolic, because “it would allow us to proclaim the freedom of women to control their bodies”.
Why does it need to be repeated?
The European far-right – which includes numerous young faces, such as that of Rassemblement National leader Jordan Bardella in France, or female faces, such as that of Giorgia Meloni in Italy – call themselves “feminists.”
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“Feminism,” like so many other terms, is used for convenience, a form of “feminist-washing” which I would characterize as one of the major cultural appropriations of the century.
What does the far-right mean for women’s rights and, more generally, for sexual and reproductive health and LGBTQI+ rights?
Interviewed by Alternatives Economiques, Sarah Durocher, chairwoman of Planning Familial, a French association that assists more than 450,000 people each year, and deals with contraception, abortion, marital violence, discrimination, and violence against gay or trans people, explains: “In every country where the far-right has come to power, it has attacked sexual and reproductive rights, contraception, and abortion, pursuing a natalist policy. There is no reason to believe that the Rassemblement National is an exception. In Poland, the right to abortion was restricted within four months. Polish women never thought this would happen. Funding for feminist associations was cut, and activists were criminalized and prosecuted.”
Feminism – in its white, partisan, heterosexual and Catholic versions – is used in electoral (and cultural) terms by the far-right depending on the political context, as Polish sociologist Elżbieta Korolczuk explains in this interview.
An interesting case, of course, is that of Giorgia Meloni: Giulia Blasi in Valigia Blu speaks of the Italian premier’s “feminism of convenience”: “It bears repeating: feminisms are collective. There is no feminism that does not pass from collectivity, from union, from the elaboration of ideas, practices and strategies, from thinking about the impact of one’s actions on society and on marginalized categories. Meloni is not interested in all this, she has never practiced it: she has done politics among men, like men, outside of any gender consciousness.”
The structural antifeminism of far-right parties
In an interview in the Tageszeitung, sociologist Maiken Schiele explains that “antifeminism is a fundamental component of far-right thinking. (It is based on) a very concrete idea of the world or how a population should be structured that contains anti-feminist traits: there are two genders, the family is the core of the nation and guarantees the continued existence of a supposedly ‘homogeneous’ people. Women are there to bear children.” This view echoes the positions of the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland): “In its program for the European elections, the party supported the traditional family: man and woman, married, lots of children. This principle is the guiding principle. Other lifestyles are tolerated, but not treated in the same way.”
Blasi comes to the same conclusions: “For that matter, on gender, the right [Meloni] have few ideas, all of which are directed toward normativity and the stiffening of roles established by patriarchal society: women are mothers, men are leaders, and even those who decide to take command do so in compliance (at least formally) with a very clear division of labor. Of course, since the days of Mussolini they have updated, now women can work outside the home, but let them never forget their mission: to bear children for the Fatherland.”
In Mediapart, Mickaël Correia interviews Manuela Tavares, co-founder of the feminist association Umar and researcher in Gender Studies at the University of Lisbon: “The recent growth of the far-right in Portugal clearly gives more political weight to anti-feminism. It is a wave across Europe and the planet: we are witnessing a freeze, if not a retreat, in women’s rights.”
Masculinist movements are also making their presence felt in Luxembourg: in Le Quotidien, Claire Schadeck of the CID Fraen an Gender association argues that masculinists “systematically reject any step toward a more inclusive and egalitarian society. For them, the roles of men and women are biologically determined.”
Recommended reading
Abortion is also a class issue
I also want to highlight an article in Krytyka Polityczna, by activist and feminist Aleksandra Taran: “For the sake of all women, we need to dismantle the idea that abortion is only a matter of free choice and personal conscience. Liberalism requires us to think in terms of individual decisions. And in the case of abortion it is not choice that matters, but access. How free is the choice of those who do not have the means to pay for it?”
In Poland, where abortion is legal only in cases of rape or if the woman’s life is in danger, women nevertheless have abortions, albeit “either illegally, or legally abroad. In all these cases, availability is limited by economic capital. […] This means that women who have no money or who live on small salaries, those who work in manual jobs, in the health or care sector or as “domestic helpers,” in catering, but also those who are financially dependent on their husbands, who are in abusive relationships or who are engaged in home and child care or caring for disabled family members, have greater difficulty in accessing a safe abortion.”
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