A bit of a kerfuffle in France over Rachida Dati, the Justice minister, who went back to work (quite stylishly at that) five days after giving birth to a baby girl – by c-section no less.
I’m sure all those who fiercely criticized Sarah Palin for returning to work days after delivering her fifth baby will be equally critical of the fetching French woman. Right?
I’ve been away on vacation for a while (yes, very nice thank you), and did not get a chance to keep an eye on this story, which I had briefly noted as I was fleeing town for the beach.
The annulment of a young Muslim couple’s marriage because the bride was not a virgin has caused anger in France, prompting President Sarkozy’s party to call for a change in the law.
The decision by a court in Lille was condemned by the Government, media, feminists and civil rights organisations after it was reported in a legal journal on Thursday. Patrick Devedjian, leader of the ruling Union for a Popular Movement, said it was unacceptable that the law could be used for religious reasons to repudiate a bride. It must be modified “to put an end to this extremely disturbing situation”, he said.
The case, which had previously gone unreported, involved an engineer in his 30s, named as Mr X, who married Ms Y, a student nurse in her 20s, in 2006. The wedding night party was still under way at the family’s home in Roubaix when the groom came down from the bedroom complaining that his bride was not a virgin. He could not display the blood-stained sheet that is traditionally exhibited as proof of the bride’s “purity”.
Mr X went to court the following morning and was granted a annulment on the grounds that his bride had deceived him on “one of the essential elements” of the marriage. In disgrace with both families, she acknowledged that she had led her groom to believe that she was a virgin when she had already had sexual intercourse. She did not oppose the annulment.
It appears, as you’ll see if you read the rest of the story as well as this one, that in France at least feminists and others are properly outraged and prepared to fight this “dangerous aberration”. I’m no expert on French marriage laws, but I never thought being in a position to “prove” one’s virginity by bleeding on the bedsheet was an “essential element” of marriage – or that it ought to be.
So my question to Canadian women’s rights groups and assorted feminists is: If you’re able and willing, more or less at the drop of a hat, to dig up decades-old cases of women being prosecuted in the United States for ending the lives of their unborn children as one of the main arguments against Bill C-484, can you say a little something against a small but tenacious portion of a religious culture that promotes and enforces such barbaric and retrograde views of women that failure to bleed on the wedding night is some kind of dishonour?
Anybody?
The government just announced that by 2012, French citizens would have a guaranteed right to child care (meaning parents will be in a position to go to court to force the government to deliver services if those aren’t readily available when needed). See the story in Le Monde, here (en français).
What’s particularly interesting is the government’s insistence on diversity in the kinds of services to be offered. Public daycare, private daycare, at-work daycare, at-home care, even trying to facilitate telecommuting for working parents so they can keep their babies with them at home, nothing seems off the table.
Pour moi, le droit opposable, ce n’est pas simplement la crèche publique : cela peut être la crèche associative, la crèche d’entreprise, l’emploi à la personne, l’emploi à domicile”, affirmait [Nicolas] Sarkozy pendant la campagne.
Memo to those who want a federally-funded, national public daycare system here in order to bring Canada closer to the “European” model: Europeans aren’t as interested in universal public systems as you think they should be…
Epinal is a French town not too far from Nancy or Strasbourg. They award something called a French Family Medal and the winners are pictured above in a local newspaper La Liberté de l’Est.
Mme Dairi raised 7 children, Malika Etassi 6, Yeza Sohbani 6, Khaddouj Karim 6, Djamila Beynée 5, Fatna El Bour 5. […] Françoise Skorynnée, raised 4 children.
So when Mark Steyn writes about changing demographics in Europe, apparently he wasn’t kidding. On a different note, I find it both strange and intriguing that they have a “family medal.”
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Rebecca adds: Wow. Vive la France libre.
While the government can certainly make it more, or less, of a hassle to have children, it can’t actually change the degree to which people want to make family their priority. This is why, attempts at increasing the birth rate aside, Quebec has the lowest birthrate in Canada and the segment of France that is reproducing is markedly different from the population overall.
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Andrea adds: Had I known that Mark Steyn would link to this post from National Review Online, I would have spent more time on it.
To explain then, why I find it “strange and intriguing” that they have a family medal:
Strange because in our post-60s era of feminism-motherhood and raising a family has been sadly and strangely diminished as the accomplishment that it is. It is some vestige of a bygone era, then for a woman my age (31) to read of a “family medal.” We are left with nothing more than an annual Hallmark remembrance to the grand accomplishment of raising kids.
Strange also because it seems that the state in France is attempting to condone some worthy traditional values, but the face of their state has changed so dramatically that they are not in fact being traditional at all and may end up condoning things like Shariah law in short order.
Intriguing because I believe we should honour motherhood. But how, in this age and era?