Criminalization of abortion in France

Criminalization of abortion in France is presented as more than a statutory prohibition: it reaches into the narrator’s speech, medical encounters, and sense of what choices can be imagined. Its practical force lies both in explicit penalties and in the fear, silence, and unequal access to care those penalties produce. Recounting the experience after abortion is no longer outlawed, the narrator treats telling it as a way to resist the secrecy that can survive a change in law.

Legal Reach and Penalties

A passage from the 1948 edition of Nouveau Larousse Universel sets out the prohibition’s broad reach. It makes liable to fines and imprisonment those who perform abortions, professionals and others who suggest or encourage them, women who have abortions, and people who instigate abortion or advocate contraception. The passage also allows for an order requiring guilty parties to leave the country; physicians, midwives, pharmacists, and others in the second category may lose the right to practise, temporarily or permanently. The law thus reaches beyond the person seeking an abortion to the people who might provide information, assistance, or care.

The narrator’s later account makes clear why this breadth matters. A doctor who helped risked not only legal punishment but the closure of a practice and the loss of a career. In the narrator’s interpretation, women without money or useful connections were especially unlikely to find a doctor willing to take that risk. The danger was not distributed evenly: the prohibition formally governed everyone involved, while the practical cost of preserving a professional livelihood could leave a pregnant woman to pursue an unsafe alternative.

A Law in Everyday Life

The law operates in the memoir as a presence in ordinary judgments and evasions, not only as a rule enforced by authorities. The narrator links it to the euphemisms and understatement in her diary, to shame surrounding women who had abortions, and to disapproval directed even at women who did not. She describes a social world in which it could seem impossible to imagine women being able to obtain abortions freely. In that world, people judged according to the law rather than asking whether the law itself was just.

Silence is one of the law’s most consequential effects. When the narrator seeks help from Doctor N, neither of them uses the word abortion. He provides a prescription for penicillin and leaves her to make her own arrangements, while his actions suggest concern that she might suffer a serious infection. The encounter offers limited protection without openly naming the reason for it. The narrator later understands this absence of a shared word as evidence that the experience had no recognized place in language: the law shapes what can be said even when it is not explicitly invoked.

Medical Care and Unequal Risk

The memoir contrasts formal medical authority with clandestine assistance. Doctors the narrator approaches do not offer the help she needs; she understands their reluctance in light of the professional penalties attached to abortion. The account does not present medical knowledge as absent, but as constrained by the law and by the unequal risks faced by providers. The narrator is left to search for someone willing to act outside that protected professional setting.

Madame P-R, a paramedic who works at a clinic, offers a clandestine procedure for four hundred francs. Her manner is practical: she focuses on timing, method, and payment rather than asking personal questions or passing moral judgment. That restraint is a source of comfort to the narrator, who recognizes that concentrating on essentials can keep a patient from being overwhelmed or changing course. Yet the arrangement is not safe simply because it is organized. LB, who directs the narrator to Madame P-R and offers to lend her the money, has contracted septicemia after her own experience. The need to seek antibiotics afterward and the risk of infection remain part of the price of care outside the law.

The hospital provides no simple contrast between clandestine danger and secure treatment. After the narrator’s condition requires emergency care, a doctor interrogates and admonishes her before directing her to Hôtel-Dieu Hospital. In the operating room, the intern’s abusive remark reduces the situation to a crude comparison with plumbing. His treatment is shaped by what he assumes about her social position; only later does he learn she is a college student. The episode shows that medical institutions may offer treatment while still exposing patients to judgment and unequal respect.

Class, Authority, and Knowledge

The narrator connects her pregnancy to her working-class origins. She is the first in her family of laborers and shopkeepers to pursue higher education, and her education has taken her away from factory work and commerce. It does not, however, remove what she describes as the inherited burden of poverty. In her account, the pregnancy becomes a mark of social failure, an experience that defeats the expectation that education alone can free her from class constraints.

The hospital encounter sharpens that contradiction. The intern treats her, until he learns otherwise, as he would an ordinary salesgirl or factory worker; his embarrassment follows the discovery that she is a student, not recognition of the insult itself. The narrator’s account therefore exposes how credentials can change the treatment a patient receives without changing the underlying hierarchy. It also places the practical knowledge exchanged among women in contrast with professional authority: LB’s account enables the narrator to find help, while the formal medical system remains constrained by law, career risk, and social judgment.

Memory and the Afterlife of Prohibition

In revisiting the experience, the narrator attends to evidence that can anchor memory: diary entries, dated records, and even library references written in blue ballpoint in an address book. These traces matter because the law’s effects were often indirect and difficult to name. The narrator treats physical records and remembered sensations as ways to recover a reality that private recollection alone may not reliably convey.

The memoir also resists the assumption that the end of a prohibition ends its silencing effects. The narrator observes that once abortion is no longer outlawed, former victims may remain silent because they assume the matter is over; that silence can preserve the secrecy created under the old regime. Writing becomes a response to this afterlife. By recounting how the law shaped access, language, and treatment, the narrator turns an experience once confined to private fear into an account meant to become intelligible beyond her own life. The law’s significance in the memoir therefore lies both in the harms it enables at the time and in the continuing need to make those harms speakable.