Born Under the X: French Law Guarantees Anonymous Childbirth
by Ron Morgan
Dr. William Pierce is the spiritual leader, informal spokesperson, and head cheerleader for the international movement to legalize the state sanctioned erasure of personal identity through anonymous birthing and abandonment. His latest rationalization, an essay entitled "Adoption and War: Privacy or Tragedy" (December 17th, 2002), excoriates the efforts of French adoptee rights advocates to overturn the system of anonymous birth originally designed and instituted by the disreputable collaborationist Vichy government in the early 1940s.
Under this system pregnant women may still enter hospital, register anonymously by signing an X, give birth, and relinquish anonymously. Dr. Pierce notes the humanity of the law, as it gave women and children a means to escape persecution and humiliation after liberation. There are more than a few things skewed about this observation, however.
For one, when the Vichy government enacted the X law in 1941, they publicly and privately expected the Nazis to win the war; as a matter of fact their legitimacy as a government depended on it. Faced with the embarrassing phenomenon of illegitimate children fathered by occupying soldiers, the Vichy regime opted for a covering lie, anonymous birth. This law shielded the regime from the consequences of defending its people against rapes and other sexual crimes perpetrated by the Nazis by making the issue of the crimes disappear,
In addition, we must remember that the Vichy government sent over 600,000 of its own citizens into forced labor for their Nazi masters, not counting the French Jews who were consigned by Vichy complicity to the Holocaust. This was not a government with a particularly notable humanitarian track record. Indeed when viewed in context, the Accouchement sous X laws can be viewed as just another crime by the Vichy regime against the humanity of its citizens.
Dr. Pierce's defense of the Accouchement sous X laws in Vichy France is that they eventually saved the lives and dignity of women who conceived with Nazi soldiers, and spared their offspring. If this was so, it was as an unintended consequence. Whatever the rationale of such a system during wartime, the French have maintained the Accouchement sous X law until today. In the years from 1945 to the early 70s, when abortion was legalized, over 10,000 French citizens a year were born with the X. Nearly 500 a year were born after the legalization of abortion.
Why did the French keep this bizarre and medieval practice, erasing the identities of hundreds of thousands of its citizens? Perhaps the easiest answer is that once this social welfare practice became institutionalized, it became normalized. The ruling constituencies of post-War France, (most of whom tacitly, if not actively, supported the Vichy government) realized that the X law afforded them the same benefits it had awarded the Vichy regime: it maintained bourgeois standards of family honor, paternity, and sexuality. It also continued to obscure criminal and abusive sexual relationships by relegating the victims and their offspring as official secrets. Today, faced with the overturning of the X law by the European Court of Human Rights, spokespersons for the French adoption industry and the Catholic Church warn of increased infanticides and abandonment. We have heard this sort of hysterical Chicken-Little-the-sky-is-falling rhetoric here in the U.S., warning against allowing adult adoptees access to their birth records.
Dr. Pierce's remarks defending the "humanitarian" Vichy regime are guaranteed to raise eyebrows both in the U.S. and internationally. They lay bare his obsession with secrecy in adoption, and paucity of imagination. Dr. Pierce simply cannot imagine a viable child welfare alternative to the systematic erasure of identity by the state. This poverty of vision is what leads him to defend the indefensible. Hopefully, the European Court of Human Rights will not be so hindered.
AUTHOR BIO: Ron Morgan is an adult adoptee. Mr. Morgan served on the Executive Committee of Bastard Nation from 1997-2001, and continues to advocate for the identity rights of adoptees. He currently resides in San Francisco with his wife and three children.