While some campaigned to obtain the right to abort and no longer resort to the dangerous clandestinity of angel makers, others suffered terminations of pregnancies and forced sterilizations carried out by well-established caregivers. All these women, however, lived at the same time, the 1970s. And in the same country, France. The only difference: the first lived in France, the second on the island of Reunion. While abortion was still prohibited here, over there, 9,000 km away, doctors were practicing it on an assembly line.
It is the story of this outrage against the mothers of the Indian Ocean that screenwriter Sophie Andriansen wanted to tell (1). The temporal contrast in the fate of these women is as appalling as it is senseless. On the one hand, doctors were condemned by the courts for allowing them to dispose of their bodies. On the other hand, their Reunionese counterparts had access to them at will without being bothered by the authorities. And by pocketing, in the process, colossal sums of money thanks to the abusive reimbursement of these acts by Social Security.
Read also: NARRATIVE. The long march for the right to abortion
“Treated like animals”
Anjale, the Reunionese illustrator of the graphic novel, remembers this same astonishment when she took stock of the scandal on the island of her childhood: It is still a taboo subject, the victims do not want to talk or no longer want to talk. There is this concern not to stir up old pains. This tragedy traumatized entire families.
The shame of having suffered a mutilation affecting the strictest privacy of motherhood, without the slightest consent.
What terrible infantilization for these women whose love and sexual lives have been managed with impunity! They felt like they were being treated like animals
,
adds Anjale. Without forgetting the humiliation of certain men who, faced with the forced sterility of their partners, then…
France
