jan 17, 1975 - Her passing of the abortion Law. The Veil Law

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Named the 'Veil Law' (Voluntary Interruption of Pregnancy Act) under Prime Minister Jacques Chirac.

Legal in France if performed in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, and performed on women above 18. This law was later amended to make it 12 weeks. It also specified that abortion must be carried out only by certified medical practitioners. Additionally, parental consent was necessary for girls under 18.

right-wingers accusing her of okaying genocide – a horrible accusation to make against a concentration camp survivor. Her response to this backlash was stern and measured. “I will share a conviction of women, and I apologize for doing it in front of this assembly comprised almost exclusively of men: No woman resorts to abortion lightheartedly,” she said.

In the middle ages, abortion was considered a cardinal sin by the Catholic Church, and was legalised during the french revolution. It was then recriminalised with the imposition of the 1810 Napoleonic Code, which punished any person who procured an abortion with imprisonment. This would then change to being legal, should the abortion save the pregnant woman's life.

Under Vichy Régime, Abortion cam with capital punishment. Afterwards the death penalty was abolished, but the consequences were still serious.

Once abortion was legalised in 1967 in the UK, women started travelling there to get it done legally instead.

In France Abortion was legalised in law 75-17 the 18th Jan 1975. This became permanent in December 1979.

Indeed, for her, a law recognising abortion was necessary because the previous law was “overtly flouted, even worse, ridiculed”[2], and this called into question the authority of the State. However, in her opinion, abortion remained a necessary evil that needed to be, in some cases, “avoided at all cost”.[3]

“No woman happily resorts to abortion. Just listen to women. It has always been a tragedy and it will remain a tragedy. Therefore, though this Bill takes into account the existing facts of situation, though it accepts the possibility of an abortion, the ultimate objective is to control it and, where possible, to dissuade women.”

Thus, dissuasion, i.e. the prevention of abortion, was key in the Bill which provided for “various forms of counselling to enable [the woman] to weigh the gravity of the choice she was about to make”
Abortion was, to all of them, an evil, which, albeit unavoidable in certain circumstances, must remain an exception. Many of them were of the opinion that the ultimate goal should be to eliminate it and that legalising abortion was only a temporary solution; through education and contraception, it would disappear de facto in the near future, except maybe in marginal situations.

However, forty years later, the situation is quite different. Not only is the number of abortions still the same, if not increasing, but all the safeguards established by the Veil Law have been gradually abolished: no refund, prohibition of incitement to abortion, psychological and social counselling and information given to women to discourage them from aborting, parental consent for minors, threshold of 10 weeks of pregnancy, seven-day cooling-off period, and partly even the right to conscientious objection of doctors and paramedics.

The Veil Law was passed on trial basis for a period of five years in order to convince the waverers that, should the experiment be inconclusive, abortion could be prohibited again. However, Law no. 79-1204 of December 31, 1979 (the Pelletier Law) confirmed the Veil Law in all its provisions.

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