One Survivor's Fight for France's Abortion Rights
May 17, 2016
By Lisa Fishbayn Joffe
Editor's note: HBI is a sponsor of the "The Law/La Loi" in the National Center for Jewish Film’s Annual Film Festival. where Simone Veil’s intrepid fight to legalize abortion in France is vividly brought to life in this taut fact-based political drama. Watch trailer.
Declaring that the need for abortion demonstrated the failure of French society to provide for adequate contraception and for supports that would allow women to carry unplanned pregnancies to term, Simone Veil, the French Minister of Health, rose in the National Assembly on No. 26, 1974, to introduce a bill that would liberalize France's abortion laws. At the time, the existing law made seeking and performing abortions a criminal offense.
Veil, a Jew and survivor of the Holocaust, endured a barrage of criticism for her advocacy. She received many irate letters from anti-Semites and endured swastikas daubed on her home. One critic in the Assembly equated abortion with the gas ovens of concentration camps.
The film, "La Loi/The Law," shows how she prevailed by providing a compelling insight into this fascinating woman and this important step in the struggle for reproductive rights.
In 1974, abortions laws were widely flouted in France. Wealthy women could secure abortions at private clinics that operated above the law or they could travel with ease to England for the procedure, where it became legal in 1967. The feminist advocacy group, Mouvement pour la Liberalization de l’Avortment et de la Contraception(MLAC), organized buses to transport women to clinics across the border, but these channels were not open to poor or young women.
Those without the money, connections or organizational skill to go around the law, resorted to performing abortions on themselves or back street abortionists, endangering their lives. It was often these women who lived in fear of being caught by the criminal law.
In her 2007 memoir, "A Life," Veil suggests that her experience of surviving the indignities of the Holocaust shaped her passion for social policies that prevented human humiliation.
Born Simone Jacob in 1927 in Nice, she was one of four children born to a family of intellectual secular Jews. In 1943, at 17, she was deported first to Drancy, then to Auschwitz along with her mother and one sister. They were later transferred to Bergen Belsen, where her mother succumbed to typhus. She and her sister Milou survived. At Drancy, they had been separated from her father and brother, who were deported to Lithuania; and, she later learned, immediately murdered. Another sister served in the resistance, was imprisoned with non-Jewish prisoners at Ravensbruck and also survived the war.
In her memoir, Veil suggests that the experiences of deportation and imprisonment shaped her response to the social policy issues she grappled with as a judge and civil servant. "No doubt what I suffered in the camps developed my extreme sensitivity to anything in human relations that generates humiliation and loss of human dignity," she wrote.
This perspective was echoed in her speech to the National Assembly on behalf of the abortion bill:
"Currently, who is bothered about the women who find themselves in this situation of distress? The law casts them not only into disgrace, shame and solitude, but also into anonymity and the fear of prosecution. They are forced to hide their condition and, too, they often find nobody to listen to them, enlighten them and offer them support and protection... Abortion is a failure when it is not a tragedy. But we can no longer turn a blind eye to the 300,000 abortions which, every year, mutilate the women of this country, which flout our laws and which humiliate and traumatize the women who resort to them."
Lisa Fishbayn Joffe is the associate director of HBI and the director of the HBI Project on Gender, Culture, Religion and the Law.