Criminalization of abortion

Criminalization of abortion in the narrator’s account operates through more than legal penalties: it enters medical encounters, social judgments, and even the words available to describe a pregnancy. In recalling her clandestine abortion, she connects the formal prohibition to unequal access to help, the pressure to remain silent, and a lasting division between those protected by authority and those exposed to its consequences. Her later writing treats this remembered experience as evidence that repeal does not automatically erase the history or stigma produced by a ban.

Legal prohibition and its reach

An excerpt from the 1948 edition of Nouveau Larousse Universel sets out the prohibition in punitive terms. It makes liable to fines and imprisonment people who perform abortions, medical professionals and others who suggest or encourage them, women who undergo abortions, and people who promote contraception. It also allows for an order requiring some of those found guilty to leave the country, and for professionals to lose the right to practice temporarily or permanently. The law thus reaches beyond the person seeking an abortion: it threatens providers, advisers, and advocates as well.

The narrator places this legal text beside her account of life in the 1960s, when abortion was forbidden. The contrast matters: the law was not an abstract rule encountered only in court. It shaped what could safely be asked of a doctor, what help could be offered, and what people understood to be morally permissible. In the narrator’s formulation, social judgment followed the law rather than judging the law itself. Prohibition could therefore make an act appear wrong simply because it was prohibited, while the legal order escaped equivalent scrutiny.

Access to care under threat

The prohibition narrows the narrator’s options as she searches for assistance in Rouen. She visits a doctor without the money or connections that might have opened other routes to help. The doctor confirms her condition and provides treatment, but does not openly offer an abortion. The narrator later interprets this reticence in light of the risks facing physicians: helping could cost a doctor a career or lead to imprisonment and the closure of a practice. The law turns a medical request into a hazardous negotiation in which the patient must seek help without knowing what can safely be said, and the doctor must weigh her need against professional jeopardy.

The account also records how limited information compounds that risk. The narrator finds no practical guidance in the novels she consults and encounters medical publications focused on the clinical consequences of illegal abortion rather than advice she can use. She preserves the references she noted in her address book, treating the marks made in blue ballpoint as durable traces of a search that memory alone could not reliably establish. Her material records register not only what she knew, but the scarcity and inadequacy of the knowledge available to her.

A route to assistance eventually comes through LB, who gives the narrator Madame P-R’s address and explains the procedure and precautions in general terms. LB’s own experience, including a serious infection, informs the advice; she offers to lend the fee of four hundred francs. The episode shows how practical knowledge and financial help circulate between women when ordinary medical channels are constrained by law. It does not make the clandestine arrangement safe or equal: access depends on personal connections, money, and knowledge passed privately from one woman to another.

Silence, stigma, and social position

The narrator’s account links the force of the law to class. She was born into a family of laborers and shopkeepers and became the first in it to pursue higher education. Although education spared her from factory or commercial work, she describes poverty as a persistent inheritance and regards her pregnancy as bound up with the stigma attached to working-class life. The prohibition bears unevenly on people with few resources: the narrator’s lack of money and connections is part of what leaves her seeking help from doctors who may not be willing to risk their position.

The law also shapes speech. The narrator avoids ordinary terms for pregnancy in her diary, using impersonal references instead. Later, she recalls that neither she nor Doctor N named abortion during their encounter. That mutual silence makes the subject difficult to address even when both understand the predicament. In this account, concealment is not merely a private choice or an individual embarrassment; it is reinforced by a legal setting in which explicit discussion can expose patients and helpers to danger.

Social stigma extends beyond women who abort. In a hospital, the narrator observes an unmarried working-class woman seeking care as she prepares to give birth and notes that she too is treated harshly. The juxtaposition unsettles any assumption that continuing a pregnancy protects a woman from judgment. The narrator sees women who abort and unmarried mothers from working-class Rouen subjected to related forms of disdain, while the law’s moral authority helps sustain a broader system of scrutiny over women’s reproductive lives.

Medical authority and unequal treatment

The narrator’s medical encounters show the law operating alongside class hierarchy rather than in isolation. After the operation, an intern’s conduct toward her is explained by the fact that he had treated a college student as an ordinary salesgirl or factory worker because he did not know her social position. The narrator recognizes that his response changes once he learns she is a student. The episode exposes a distinction within medical care: social standing can affect how a patient is treated, even when the underlying need is the same.

A sentence uttered by the intern remains central to the narrator’s memory because it crystallizes this divide. She interprets it as separating doctors from workers and women seeking abortions, and those who rule from those ruled. The force of the remembered words does not depend on the law being explicitly invoked in that moment. Rather, the law’s unequal distribution of risk and protection forms part of the context through which she understands the encounter. The intern’s authority is backed by a system in which the patient’s need is difficult to name and her social position can determine the manner of her treatment.

The account resists a simple division between medical professionals as uniformly willing or unwilling to help. The doctor in Rouen does not openly undertake the abortion, and Doctor N’s intentions remain uncertain to the narrator even in retrospect. He gives her advice about penicillin while declining to hear where she is going. She once believed that a more forceful appeal might have changed his response, but later allows that she may have misread the encounter. This uncertainty keeps the law’s effects in view without claiming access to motives the narrative cannot establish.

Repeal, memory, and public testimony

At the time of writing, the narrator observes that abortion is no longer outlawed. Yet she rejects the assumption that the end of criminalization makes the earlier experience irrelevant or renders testimony unnecessary. When a discriminatory law is repealed, former victims may fall silent on the grounds that the matter is over; that silence, she argues, can leave the past concealed much as it was before. The changed legal status makes it possible for her to approach the experience without adopting the stark formulas associated with earlier protest, and instead to recover its particular realities.

That recovery depends on both recollection and material evidence. The address-book references, diary entries, and sensations associated with people and things help her establish what happened, while also showing the limits of memory as an account of the past. The book gives the law a presence that is difficult to see directly: it appears in guarded speech, failed requests, private networks of assistance, medical caution, and remembered encounters. Writing converts these dispersed traces into a public record.

The narrator ultimately presents the experience as a source of writing rather than as a past event that can simply be put aside. She relinquishes the guilt she had attached to having experienced it without acting sooner, and considers the possibility that recounting it can make an individual history intelligible to others. In this sense, the remembered effects of criminalization survive its formal end, while testimony challenges the secrecy that once helped the prohibition govern everyday life.