On Tuesday 28th January, French MPs voted, in first reading, with 359 votes against 24, the bill for equality between women and men. This way they endorse two controversial provisions: the suppression of the concept of distress to access to abortion, and the extension to information for the “offense of obstruction to voluntary termination of pregnancy (VTP)“.This legal, ethical and medical upheaval succeeds that of the authorization of research on the embryo and precedes that of the end of life. Jean-Marie Le Méné, chairman of the Jérôme Lejeune Foundation, analyses this situation politically and philosophically.
G: Since the presidential election, there have never been so many societal liberal-libertarian reforms. What about so much determination of the actual majority?
JMLM: It could be easy to dump on the left-wing government, finding a scapegoat. All transgressions called societal have been initiated and then voted under right-wing government: contraception, divorce, abortion, MAP, embryo selection, research destroying the embryo…
Of course these reforms have been voted with the complicity of the left-wing government. Without forgetting the Léonetti law on the end of life which included anticipatory defects of the future legislation of euthanasia. Without forgetting the project of civil union for homosexuals which was in the pipeline of Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007. Without forgetting the teaching of gender developed in Political Sciences School by Richard Descoings, and then on the school programs by Luc Châtel. Today it is finished. The left-wing government has done the ideological harvest of what was sowed in terms of relativism, liberalism, utilitarianism, from more than forty years by the casual right-wing government philosophically.
G: In your opinion why and how did we reach this situation?
JMLM: We are the first in the history of the world to live “the abolition of the man” (C.S. Lewis in 1943). There is a rejection of the man, a rejection of the attention given to the man, a rejection of humanism. We do not ask anymore how to promote the human, but why to promote the human? What is the point? Since the Age of Enlightenment, the man became its own limit, its own measure and its own foundation. We passed from values which draw their legitimacy from an external referential (God, the nature…) to a strictly autonomous referential. Once free from the divine, we replace it by arbitrary counterfeits. Today, it is the technoscience, a kind of fatum.Indeed, when one reduces us to our cells, genome, molecules, nothing distinguishes us from other living species.
As the man has no more sense, he only has to live and enjoy, from which eugenics and hedonism. And the necessity to remove the disorder and the misfortune before the birth as well as in the end of life. The disability and the illness generate disorder and misfortune, whereas abortion and euthanasia become factors of order and fortune. The violence is sacred with scapegoats, the undesired child like the undesirable elderly. Élisabeth Badinter talks about the sacred right of abortion. An act of which we cannot talk about without reverence under penalty of two-year jail since the liberticidal law voted in the night of 21st January 2014.
Finally all this is regulated by the market. This large necessity of immediate enjoyment is caused by an offer which creates the demand: procreative industry, business of embryonic stem cells, market of screening, commodification of the living, etc.
G: How to interrupt such an anger which seems frenetic?
JMLM: We could see a strong popular mobilization (marriage for all, one of us, Estrela report). Unfortunately, we assist to a too small mobilization of political and moral authorities which remains worrying because it cannot allow moving up a gear. In the field of the respect of the life for instance, the encephalogram is flat. Awaking opposition politicians (except a little bit) to emergencies dictated by the dramatic news of the culture of death, in our country is a mission which seems impossible. To massively demonstrate, only the people succeeded in. What is the political project for tomorrow? It is urgent to work on the moral and political “conversion” of those who are formally in charge of the common good, what will generate the movement.
G: This “sacred right to abortion” the bill for equality between women and men affirms, do you think we will be able, like in Spain, to come back on by a collective consideration?
JMLM: Saying we cannot going back on the society project is a lie. Several countries did it and others plan to do it. Spain has taken the lead on France because it goes out of the abstract logical of a right to abortion to be based on the well concrete reality of the child conceived which exist before its birth and must be protected. But the Spanish popular party has more anthropologic coherence as the French UMP. We only needed to see, in the night of 21st January, at the National Assembly, the ideological alignment of the greatest part of the French “right-wing government” on the socialist diktat relative to abortion.
The bourgeois crossing of this anthropologic desert, it is enough! Killing children, and soon ill patients and end-of-life elderly, you cannot really do that, it is called barbarism.One exhausts words outside France. We have to make understand that abortion is not only a feminist claim, a question of individual conscience or personal distress. It has a deep effect on the while collectivity. There are demographic (9 million children unborn for 40 years), medical(eugenics are widely accepted), legal (the legal referential becomes the right to kill)consequences. We cannot be credible in the defense of the family if we avoid fighting against what pulverizes it in its weakest link: the unborn child. Because by destroying the child, we destroy the family, by destroying the family, we place the individual alone face with the State and the Market.