Hate messages turned into funding for abortion #IWD2017

For the Internation Women’s Day, the EHF wanted to serve some good news and we thought that this wonderful story would bring some happiness to our communnity.

Nowadays, when it sometimes feels like ignorance is bliss, it is good to remember the power of facts. This is particularly true regarding various myths surrounding  the old idea of banning abortion. Here is a great story which can inspire us in our fight to defend women’s rights and bodily integrity.

During the 2015 French regional elections, Marion Maréchal Le Pen, niece of the Front National leader Marine Le Pen, declared that she would cut off public funding for family planning clinics in the southeastern region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur if she gets elected. She argued that those associations were “politicized” and were “openly promoting medical abortion” as means of contraception.

This shocking proposal immediately sparked great controversy among the public, and a French blogger calling herself “Klaire fait Grrr” decided to respond to the candidate’s idea with a few basic yet extremely powerful facts. In a 1-minute video, she reaffirms the social usefulness of family planning and highlights the lack of consistency of a proposal aiming at cutting their funding to reduce abortion rates.

The video wildly circulated on the Web, and the young blogger rapidly found herself overwhelmed by hundreds of harmful and hateful comments regarding her support to abortion. However, instead of feeling intimidated, “Klaire Fait Grr” came up with the bright idea to gather the worst messages in a book in order to denounce hate speech. The crowdfunding project was a success: 2346 books were pre-ordered by January 2016 out of an initial objective of 50. She finally received 14000 euros from the publication of the book which she integrally donated to the French Planned Parenthood.

The project is over since then and the book is no longer available for sale, but the story of this young blogger’s reaction still embodies a daring and clever way to “turn a torrent of mud into something really useful”, as the author herself puts it.

To visit Klaire’s blog (in French), please follow this link.