Tear gas: protesters report gynaecological problems

According to franceinfo, many women report gynaecological problems since the demonstrations of 17 and 24 October, after being exposed, for varying lengths of time, to tear gas. Unusual pain, bleeding, missed periods: one of them speaks of "pains I had never experienced before". That is what the dispatch says, and all it says.

What we do not yet know is considerable. The text we have does not quantify these reports, does not say whether a study is under way, nor whether health authorities or the Interior Ministry have responded. No causal link is established here: these are testimonies, not a diagnosis. It would be dishonest to go further than what doctors can confirm. It would be just as dishonest to brush these accounts aside with a shrug because they come from women speaking about their bodies.

From here on, this is our reading. If you want to know what a state inflicts on its citizens, look at what it bothers to measure. Public order is planned, equipped and budgeted; its effects on menstrual cycles, fertility or pregnancy seem, by contrast, to fall into a blind spot. The bodies used as reference in protocols are rarely bodies that bleed every month. If the reports were confirmed, it would be less a surprise than a symptom: that of a medicine and a police force moving forward without asking what it does to women.

There is also a question of work, in the broad sense. What is called social reproduction is all the labour that makes and sustains people: caring, feeding, raising, accompanying. It rests overwhelmingly on women, often unpaid or nearly so. When their reproductive health is affected, this is not merely a private matter. A pain that settles in, a disrupted cycle: these mean appointments, tests, working days cut short, and domestic arrangements to readjust. The burden falls first on the person concerned, then on her household. And we know what waiting times to see a gynaecologist are worth when the public hospital is bled dry.

Which leaves the essential question: who cares about these testimonies? Protest is a right, often the last lever of those with neither lobbyists nor consultancy contracts. If exercising that right costs people their health, it is diminished for everyone. We therefore ask what any reader is entitled to expect: a serious count of cases, independent doctors to examine them, and public answers on the composition and use of these gases. In the meantime, the accounts gathered by franceinfo deserve better than administrative silence.