Strategic secularization and gender relationships in the Belgian and French “pro-life” movement

Organizations combatting abortion, self-identified as “pro-life” movements, are particularly active. What is striking is how young many of the activists are, suggesting that the “pro-life” movements have undergone a significant “generational renewal”: the new Belgian “pro-life” group “Gloria” , created in 2020, is led by a team of 10 young professionals and students in their twenties, and has more than 70 “volunteers”/“activists” in the same age group. The French movement “Les Survivants” (“those who survived) is composed “exclusively by youth born after 1975 (…) because we could have not been there (…)” and the French “Marche pour la vie” is lead by the “generation pro-vie”, a group of young activists all over France. This resurgence of youth activism in the pro-life movement raises important questions, particularly because surveys show that young people consider abortion to be a right (Valk et al., 2009). However, to suggest that these activists are "opposed" to the youth of their generation may suggest that they have not evolved and have remained the heirs of the 1970s movements. This young group thinks itself as the “pro-life” generation. What does it mean to be a “pro-life generation”? What impacts does it have on the movement? Created in the bosom of the Church in 1968, the "pro-life" movement in Belgium has undergone profound transformations, and so does their French counterparts. These transformations can be highlighted by a sociology of the activists. Who is this "pro-life generation"? How did they change the pro-life movement? This paper will be based on interviews conducted from a comprehensive perspective (Avanza, 2018) with activists involved in "Gloria" and the “generation pro vie” in France. The interviews conducted with these young activists provide insight into their social characteristics, as well as their representations on family values, reproduction and sexuality, what I call “gender relationships”. Activists have also tried to change their image and repertoire of actions, in order to move away from the perceptions more often associated with them – Catholic moral – and to attract a more diverse audience. Considering that this generation has only lived under the abortion laws both in Belgium and France, how do they try to be heard? We will see that, despite a resemblance between the French and the Belgian movement in terms of sociological characteristics, the two movements have a different approach, the Belgian focusing on the “morality” of the act while the French still have hope of overturning the law. This paper will focus on this “new morality” and the difficult balance between distancing themselves from religion while defending, empirically, traditional values in term of sexual and reproductive norms. Using Juan Marco Vaggione’s notion of “strategic secularization” (Vaggione, 2005) will allow to understand this ambivalent relationship to religion and how to understand the values they are defending.