PArmi the announcements made by Emmanuel Macron during his press conference on January 16, which addresses the aim of a “demographic rearmament” In view of the war terms used, France seems to me not only shocking, but also scandalous from a democratic point of view. To affirm the need for pronatalist policies, even if accompanied by a plan to combat infertility, is to restart a program from another time and to reverse decades of feminist conquests in favor of women’s autonomy.
There is a close connection between control over the womb and the patriarchal logic of the objectification of the female body. Since Aristotle defined female existence solely through the prism of sexual and reproductive functions, it has been seen as a resource that society and every man in particular possesses in common – even in our modern societies, and which is also reflected in gestures and words The smallest human being jumps at the sight of a pregnant body.
This idea of ownership of reproductive capacity was theorized in the 1970s. For American radical activists, forced motherhood represented the price women had to pay to protect those who became them “Owner” and protected her from the violence of other men. Among French materialists, the anthropologist Colette Guillaumin mobilized the idea of “Sexing” refers to the appropriation of women in their physical individuality by the class of men who have monopolized control over their time (domestic tasks), the products of their bodies (children) and their sexuality (marriage, prostitution).
Logics of expropriation
Fifty years later, these analyzes are by no means outdated, as contemporary mobilizations against sexist, domestic and sexual violence demonstrate. Women’s bodies remain the site of sexual/maternal service owed to society and men. Those who try to avoid this risk a sanction that is often symbolic – non-motherhood strongly stigmatizes those who make the choice – but sometimes fatal – it should be remembered that femicide is mainly the work of men who it can. Are you unable to tolerate your partner’s departure or desire to leave?
When the President of the Republic regrets the fact that women do not have more children, he obscures the reasons why the parenting project is sobering today. The general conditions for starting families are discouraging. Environmental crisis, inflation, international uncertainty: there are many reasons to give up being a parent. But it is above all the conditions under which women become mothers that we must question. The survey I conducted among about thirty of them (Such a big belly. Lived experiences of the pregnant bodyStock, 2023) reveals the intensity of the logic of dispossession through which women feel reduced to their very large stomachs and, in the truest sense of the word, desubjectivized, that is, deprived of all reflexivity and all freedom of choice during their pregnancy and beyond.
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