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Update
The law decriminalizing abortion, carried by Simone Veil, allowed women to be able to interrupt an unwanted pregnancy, without risking their lives or going to a foreign country where it was authorized… Extract from the magazine “1:15 p.m. on Sunday” of July 1 .
Contraception and abortion were banned in France during the Trente Glorieuses. So, the women manage, arrange themselves in the back yards, on kitchen tables, delivered clandestinely into the hands of “angel makers” armed with knitting needles. A long procession of drama… “At the emergency guards, we saw women arriving who were bleeding, who were infected. What’s more, they stayed in the corners because they were being yelled at. Suddenly, we had to understand all that: they were pregnancies unwanted and abortion was medically prohibited”recalls gynecologist Joëlle Brunerie-Kauffmann.
“These poor women, in refusing their pregnancy, were obliged to induce their abortion alone or to ask friends to do it, but it was with a method which was not at all medical, clean, explains the feminist activist. To have the right to a curettage, an abortion method specific to that era, one had to already be bleeding and be in the process of miscarriage. You had to pretend to have a natural miscarriage to get a curettage at the hospital.”
A woman dies every day from a clandestine abortion
“And to bleed, you had to infect the egg, continues the doctor. The only solution was to put a small probe in the uterus, a scoubidou or something, and leave it in place until it bled and became infected. This led to disasters…” In the 1970s, a woman died every day as a result of a clandestine abortion. Others emerge mutilated and sterile. Women who can afford it go abroad: England, Holland, Switzerland… where abortion is legal and safe. It was before the vote in 1975 of the law relating to the voluntary termination of pregnancy brought by Simone Veil.
“I left for Switzerland. We went from Paris to Lausanne in five hours. And I said to myself that, in five hours, I can ask a doctor the question, be seen in a clinic”, Simone Iff, president of Family Planning from 1973 to 1981, testified in 2012.When they asked me why I came, remembered the abortion rights activist who died in 2014, I was unable to tell that it was for an abortion. In front of my face, the person at reception said to me with a big smile: ‘An abortion?’ I answered yes. The word was said. The thing was written in a medical notebook. There, I said to myself that in France it must be like that.”