This is a historic time. France has just enshrined the right to abortion in its constitution, the first nation to do so explicitly.

In 1789, France adopted the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.” Partly modeled on the U.S. Declaration of Independence and drafted by the Marquis de Lafayette with aid from Thomas Jefferson, the French Declaration differed from the American in its absence of religious reference and its greater stress on equality.

But both failed to enshrine the equality of the sexes: The needs of women were largely ignored. In neither nation would they obtain the right to vote until well into the 20th century. Both countries legalized abortion in the 1970s, a step essential to realizing true equality. If women cannot control their own reproduction, they cannot be truly free.

But the U.S. Supreme Court in the 2022 Dobbs decision struck down a woman’s implicit constitutional right to an abortion. As a result, we are confronted with an even harsher and more misogynistic regimen in Alabama (and several other red states): the notion of personhood beginning at conception, or fetal personhood, is being used to ban in vitro fertilization and criminally prosecute women for alleged “child endangerment” for behavior undertaken even before they could have known they were pregnant.

Fetal personhood’s advocates, mostly Christians, are openly religious in their advocacy, reason enough to oppose them in a country built on the promise of church/state separation. But their view is without biblical warrant (abortion is nowhere mentioned) and directly contradicts the teachings of the greatest classical theologians, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.

They both held that it is the intellect that makes us human, but that the intellect cannot be present until the necessary organ, the brain, is functioning in the fetus. That, we now know, takes place at around the start of the third trimester. Fetal personhood is a fraud, and its barely concealed motivation is the need for men to have control over women’s fertility.

I say, vive la France!

John Connolly

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