Ideas are often much more powerfully transmitted through stories, culture and narratives of personal experience than through facts or polemics.
And while “abortion rights” have become established in law in most countries (and defended by the majority of the political class), it’s fascinating to note that movies and television dramas are often surreptitiously pro-life.
Bridget Jones’s Baby was last year’s big hit and is now out on DVD. When the ditzy Bridget falls fecklessly pregnant at the age of 43 – having been tipsily involved with two different guys – the option of “abortion” isn’t mentioned once. Quite quickly into the film, we have Emma Thompson as a brisk medic carrying out an ultrasound scan, waving at the small human image on the screen: “Hello, baby!” From there on, it’s a hilarious romp through a comedy that is airily lacking in moral judgment, yet its subtext is affirmatively pro-baby and pro-life.
In Paris last week, I saw the newest French screwball film comedy, called Telle mère, telle fille, which might be translated as “Like Mother, Like Daughter”. It’s about a madcap and irresponsible 47-year-old named Mado, played by the beguiling Juliette Binoche (wildly untidy, smoking fags and running around Paris on a scooter), and her more proper, married daughter, Avril (Camille Cottin). Avril is 30 and welcomes motherhood: her competitive mother is furious about looming grandmotherhood, yet also becomes pregnant (after an encounter
with her ex-husband).
Abortion is indeed considered, even recommended. The doctor prescribes abortion pills which Mado is on the point of swallowing – then suddenly coughs up. “After all, I’m for life,” she says. “I’m a mother!” Comical chaos all round as we follow the escapades of the pregnant duo, the appalled menfolk, the disapproving in-laws and the gay gynaecologist. And of course when babies duly arrive, everyone is wildly happy.
Similarly, in the superb Danish crime thriller on BBC Four, Follow the Money – just concluded last weekend – Kristina, wife of the lead detective, finds she is accidentally pregnant in her forties. She also has a chronic health condition and tells her husband she’ll seek an abortion. Yet she doesn’t, and in the final instalment, her baby is born prematurely – but to everyone’s joy, survives and becomes a symbol for life triumphing over dark deeds.
The continual message of popular comedy and drama is that babies are great: and the ultrasound scan is the key moment that heralds their presence.
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The French presidential candidates have been asked by a history journal, Historia, to name the character they most admire from the past. The National Front’s Marine Le Pen has nominated Cardinal Richelieu, born in 1585, the canny and manipulative chief minister to Louis XIII, and perhaps best known for his menacing role in Dumas’s The Three Musketeers (and in the canine version popular with children, Dogtanian).
Richelieu, a bishop at 22 and a cardinal at 37, had few scruples about who his allies were so long as it strengthened France’s hand. Ms Le Pen says of her hero: “He knew how to separate his religious convictions from the interests of the state – allying with Protestant princes against the very Catholic Habsburgs. He firmly suppressed the nobility, created the Académie française, and favoured commercial development.”
This must send a signal about her own values: she would link up with Vladimir Putin if she thought it served her political purposes: suppress the modern left-liberal elites, and elevate France’s interests and language.
Should the lady become president, and abandon the euro in order to revive France’s own currency, perhaps she will restore the cardinal back to the banknotes. He appeared, looking imperious (from that splendid portrait by Philippe de Champaigne) on the 10 franc banknote of yore. These beautiful remnants of a previous currency are now collectors’ items.
The political class in France deplores Brexit, and the theme of perfide Albion looms in public debates. Yet when I was a young au pair in Paris in the 1960s, the political class agreed with General de Gaulle that Britain would never fit into a club of continental Europeans.
De Gaulle deliberately kept Britain out of what was then the EEC for this reason, and he was widely supported. Now history comes full circle!
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