A 38 year-old man from northern France has been sentenced to four years imprisonment, one of them suspended, by the appeals court of Amiens for having induced an unwanted abortion on his girlfriend at the beginning of 2013.
Provoking an abortion without a woman’s consent constitutes an offense under French penal law: it is in fact the only type of abortion that is ever punished by French tribunals.
Vincent Ménard’s relationship with his girlfriend was already in bad shape when in February 2013, he learned she was nearly 4 months pregnant. The news “devastated” him. It was too late for a legal abortion, which is considered a women’s right up to 12 weeks gestation in France, and, in any case, the woman was happy to be expecting his baby. He decided to take the matter into his own hands.
Ménard bought “abortion pills” on the black market in an immigrant quarter of Paris – the same as those being touted by “pro-choice” activists to facilitate abortion in countries where it is illegal – and laced his girlfriend’s smoothie with eight of the cachets. She unknowingly swallowed the drink.
Six hours later, the young woman experienced heavy and painful cramping and an extremely rapid dilation of the cervix: she lost her baby soon afterwards. “It was horrible. I was yelling but he ran away, he abandoned me,” she told the judges at the Beauvais penal tribunal last September.
Ménard showed no remorse at that first hearing, explaining that he was “afraid” about the “responsibility” the birth of his child would put on his shoulders. He “wasn’t ready to have a child,” he said. He had gone to Paris to find “suicide pills”: it was only because he was not successful that he decided to buy abortion pills instead.
“I thought I wouldn’t be able to play my part as a father. I had no control over my own life: how could I look after a child?” he told the tribunal. His girlfriend was still “in love” with him and was dreaming of becoming a mother, but he “was afraid to have to take care of the financial burden” of having a baby.
He did in fact take care to remove 115,000 Euros – nearly 150,000 USD – from the couple’s joint account to his personal one as soon as he heard about his girlfriend’s pregnancy, a sign that he was intent on “protecting his liberty and his financial interests,” noted the public prosecutor at the trial.
Ménard was condemned to pay 20,000 Euro damages to his now estranged girlfriend and to four years imprisonment, one of them suspended, and was jailed immediately.
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He was soon to be set free on parole and went on to appeal the decision, hoping to obtain a more lenient conviction. Ménard expressed “deep remorse” at the hearing last May. His lawyer underscored that his client now realizes that it was not up to him alone to decide that there would be no child, even though “they made a baby behind his back,” his lawyer said, using in its literal sense a French expression that designates betrayal.
The appeals court refused to reduce Ménard’s sentence, however.
The case does underline the profound inconsistency of abortion laws, in France and elsewhere. Ménard’s arguments are precisely those invoked by women who are distressed by an “unwanted pregnancy”: fear about the future, not “feeling ready” or “up to having a child,” a bad relationship with their partner, financial worries, suicidal thoughts, etc. These are all considered valid reasons to have an abortion. And in many countries, where abortion is considered a woman’s right, she needs give no reason at all.
Above all, abortion laws in Western countries do not require the father to be informed, much less to give his consent.
This situation evidently does not conform to “parity” laws and “gender equality” measures: men do not have the same right as regards their unborn child and abortions as mothers do. Neither Ménard nor his lawyer thought of pleading this point, so used has society grown to seeing abortion as a woman’s affair.