Bush and abortion June 18, 2004
Yesterday I saw a very sad documentary about a country I know well: Kenya. Africa is prey to every possible misfortune. One of its problems is simply the birth rate. And control of that birth rate (and, incidentally, control of the explosive spread of AIDS) means condoms. But those are too expensive for poor people. Before, they were distributed by clinics subsidized by the American government. But abortions were also performed there, under good conditions.
Bush is in the middle of an election campaign and wants to stroke his "conservative Christian" electorate the right way. The fight against abortion is, it seems, one of the central themes of his campaign. When you know the throes in which today's world is struggling, it's surreal. But a reelection hinges on very little. Today's world is dominated by a "democracy" led by a bunch of lawless types, elected and reelected by idiots constituting "deep America." So he decided to cut off all aid to clinics and hospitals around the world that perform abortions. As a result, African women find themselves with new mouths to feed and don't know what to do, and clandestine abortions are multiplying. "Backstreet doctors" have reappeared, who aren't any more doctors than you or I. To add to this catastrophic picture, American Catholic missionaries destroy brochures relating to contraceptive measures.
I once helped a woman get an abortion, back when it was still illegal. I wasn't the one who had gotten her pregnant. Her name was Geneviève (that's her real name) and I had found her lost, in Saint Tropez in 1959, knocked up for a few months, desperate, ready to end her days. I decided to help her. I started by finding a backstreet doctor in Paris who agreed to perform these things, for a sum that, in today's money, would be equivalent to fifteen hundred euros. But the money had to be found. On his advice, I went to see the father of a friend, quite rich, who lived in Paris, near the Eiffel Tower. I explained the problem to him. On the one hand he made it clear he was convinced I was the father, on the other he gave me great moralizing lectures saying "that woman should just raise her child." I had to manage otherwise, borrow, quickly. It was my friend Louis de Fouquières who lent me the money. I remember.
I'm dying to name that jerk from the Left Bank who had "zipper factories in South America," a splendid villa in Saint Tropez, and didn't tie his dogs with sausages, believe me. One of his sons had a mistress, originally from Saint Tropez, who was a friend of mine. Her name was Françoise (that's her real name). One day she got pregnant. The boy's father choked. She would have been perfect for squandering the family fortune. He didn't hesitate for a second. Françoise got an illegal but very high-end abortion. The top of the line in that field. The father came himself to pick her up at the airport, at Le Bourget, then she was taken to a clinic in Neuilly where "everything went very well." She was directly curetted under anesthesia. The next day Françoise found an immense bouquet of flowers in her room. Which goes to show that when the family fortune is at stake, morality can take on variable geometry.
I suppose that if Bush got one of his secretaries knocked up she'd be entitled to the same thing.
Perhaps it should be explained what a clandestine abortion is. The abortionist uses a probe and causes a hemorrhage by placing it over the whole embryo-placenta. Then, when the hemorrhage starts, it's possible to get the woman admitted to a clinic, which will claim that the abortion (that is, the curettage under anesthesia) had become indispensable given that the woman was presenting a significant hemorrhage. But it happens that the woman, in the throes of this hemorrhage, expels the embryo herself. And it also happens that very serious complications appear.
A brick to insert a probe (but at the time all of this was punishable by prison, for the "man of the art" as for his woman and any accomplice). I remember Geneviève's face when we came out of the abortionist's office. She had started bleeding profusely, leaving drops on the subway platform. In the hours that followed she was able to find an entrance into a clinic where "everything went well."
- The job was well done, the doctor had told me.
In a clinic abortion, when the pregnancy is recent, the doctor inserts a sort of syringe and aspirates the fetus. Afterward, he examines and gives antibiotics. It's one of the techniques. I'm not a doctor.
In Africa women use any instrument to provoke this hemorrhage, whatever they have at hand, such as a drinking straw, not disinfected, obviously. Very often, they die from it. A massive absorption of .. tea also has an abortive character, causing the expulsion of the fetus through contractions. There are also men and women who insert various and varied probes, for a few dollars. There too, it's a mess. Finally, in Nairobi you find garbage bags, every morning, filled with fetuses. The program showed these photos. There were many fetuses practically come to term. In any case, in certain miserable households, if the woman isn't aborted, the child is killed at birth.
*- Thank you, Mr. Bush. *
I have often been asked why I did not go and make a career in the United States, where I had made a first stay in 1961, on leaving Supaéro. At the time America was already like that. A mixture of J.R. Ewing-style cynicism and prudish hypocrisy, combined with a total ignorance of what is happening in the rest of the world. It seems that in the USA a theme park has opened showing living conditions in various poor countries. The shantytowns, minus the smell. With presentable poor people, not too thin, all the same. If I were the director of this center, I would put ripped-open garbage bags on a street corner, with dead fetuses, laid out. Plastic fetuses, of course. If real fetuses were put there, stuffed with formalin and plastic, the visitors would faint. Misery has its limits all the same. The goal is in fact to make Americans aware of the luck they have.
Memories come back. At the end of the fifties I had explored the Port-Miou hole, in the Calanques of Marseille. It is a strong freshwater resurgence that pours into the Calanque, below sea level, through a vast archway. It is an amazing place where fresh water glides over seawater, giving fantasmagorical greenish reflections (careful, cave diving is not a matter for novice divers). When you enter this resurgence through this vast archway you come, ten or twenty meters further on, upon a shaft a few meters in diameter, which opens out at the surface. On the right there is a chamber, submerged and strewn with oyster shells. The reason: when these galleries were dry, at the time of the last glaciation, it was the dining room of our ancestors. The fact is little known. I say this because there would doubtless be interesting excavations to carry out over there, in this place close to the "Cosquer cave", under a few meters of water. With my friend Jean-Claude Mitteau, when we were twenty, we had made a raid into this underground river by pushing four hundred meters from the entrance, with two scuba tanks, one on the back and another as a backup, on the belly. With a hemp cord as our Ariadne's thread.
I remember that one day we found a small suitcase, placed on the bottom, which had visibly been thrown into the shaft. I wondered what was inside and I opened it. A good-sized fetus came out. I admit that I did not feel like putting it back in the suitcase and that I left it there, floating between two waters.
That too was what clandestine abortions were like, at that time.
I think back to the USA. After the war, Americans returning from Viet-Nam, suddenly demobilized, completely lost, wandered here and there across the territory of the United States, incapable of readapting. The Americans had moreover completely obscured this "bad war", which they had lost. I remember that when I had gone over there at that time, no one wanted to broach the question:
*- This war is our business. We do not wish to talk about it. *
It is a country where everything is volatile, even drama. The show must go on. In short, some of these veterans had created a bit of disorder in a small town in the Middle West by living in tents like tramps, in the neighboring forest and by coming, at night, to look for their grub in the garbage cans. The mayor had then found the solution. He had created a new offense by decreeing that in his town, household garbage was private property.
Einstein was perhaps right, when he said that America had passed directly from barbarism to decadence.
But are we any better, with our ministers who endorse the relocation of profitable industries to countries where profit margins are higher, caring little about the despair of employees. What had that good old Alain Juppé done, who is once again prancing at the heart of the political class? Fictitious jobs, I believe. At the time when he had been put in difficulty a large-circulation magazine had devoted a 15-page dossier to him where he was seen withdrawing "dignifiedly" with his wife, in Brittany, to "take some distance", in the face of the terrible blow that had just been dealt to him but, in this difficult patch, but "surrounded by the affection of his own". Do you remember? No. No importance. Meh, it's forgotten, now and, height of irony, the unsinkable Bernard Tapie has restored his health by playing incorruptible policemen. Brilliant, isn't it? I tell you, we live in a fantastic era.
But there are sometimes simple gestures, almost insignificant, which have poignant human consequences ten thousand kilometers away. Bush strokes the extremist fringe of his "conservative Christian" electorate (integrist Catholics, Protestants, various sects) by making the fight against abortion his electoral hobbyhorse. Ten thousand kilometers away a young African woman is dying of infection, in her hut, after having tried to abort herself. But Bush cannot be aware of problems of this kind: before becoming president he had never left the United States. For him countries are colored patches on a world map.
I think back to England, in January 2001, when I was coming back from that colloquium on "advanced propulsion" and had discovered, over there, the fantastic American breakthrough in the area of hypervelocity MHD torpedoes and hypersonic stealth super-planes. The guys who had been wallowing for twenty years in these black programs looked quite comfortable in their own skin. They were jovial, enthusiastic. I came back from there feeling sick, thinking about the money they had blown on these "toys". But do you know what argument is thrown back at you, in the USA, when you bring up things of this kind?
It works and it's legal
That's enough for them. In 1961, when I was taking the boat back to France after leaving Princeton, I simply told myself that these people were us in fifty years. And that is exactly what is happening. In '61 Gabin was starring in "Razzia sur la schnouf". Drugs then appeared to us as a marginal phenomenon, tied to the "underworld" or affecting a few outsiders from the jet set or the arts. But, in New York, I had seen a guy dead of an overdose sprawled on the ground in the middle of the street. People walked past without stopping. At that time Glenn Ford played the brave little teacher in "Blackboard Jungle", a black-and-white film about the rise of violence in American schools. In Europe we had watched the final scene, where the teacher confronted one of his students in front of the class, armed with a knife, with wide eyes.
I remember a moment spent at Washington Square, in the middle of New York. At that time, back home, the cops, who had only just given up their capes, had 7.65 mm pistols (Herstal ones, I think) in antique holsters. The American policeman wore his six-shooter against his thigh. From time to time he took it out to check it. Intrigued, I eventually asked him about his gesture. Here is his answer:
- My friend, I don't know how it goes where you're from. But last week a colleague of mine was on patrol, in Brooklyn. He came across two teenagers, thirteen and fifteen, two blacks who were trying to break into a store at night. He went up to them and asked them to come over. So one of the kids shot him right in the chest with a nine-millimeter he pulled out of his shirt. Now he's between life and death.
I think that we Europeans would do well to try to imagine that on every level, except economic and techno-scientific power, the United States represents ... our future.
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