Time in the experience of abortion

Time in the experience of abortion is not a neutral sequence of dates but a force shaped by waiting, bodily uncertainty, legal constraint, and memory. Annie Duchesne’s account moves between the slow passage of the 1963–1964 ordeal and the later act of reconstructing it, showing how an event can seem suspended while it is happening and acquire a new duration when it is written.

Waiting and bodily time

In October 1963, in Rouen, the narrator waited more than a week for her period. The delay reorganized ordinary days around the possibility of its arrival: she returned to her room in the girls’ dormitory hoping for a sign, and began keeping a diary in which she recorded the continuing absence. Nights did not bring relief; she would wake with the instinctive knowledge that nothing had changed. A year earlier she had begun a novel, but now that work seemed remote from the immediate uncertainty.

The waiting also altered how she understood the future. While watching an Italian film about a young office clerk, she became certain that the bleeding would not return. Once she knew she was pregnant, time ceased to be a succession of university classes, café visits, library afternoons, exams, and summer plans. It became an expanding condition inside her that she believed had to be ended. The future no longer appeared as an open prospect: it narrowed toward a consequence she did not intend to accept.

That altered sense of time did not remain constant. By mid-December, the narrator’s body had changed, and nausea had stopped. At moments she could forget that she was two months pregnant. She experienced this temporary distance from the situation as a numbing process, one that could allow weeks or months to pass while anxiety about the eventual outcome receded from attention. Lying in winter sunlight and listening to the Brandenburg Concerti, she could feel as if nothing in her life had changed. The contrast between that ordinary scene and the future she feared makes the passage of time unstable: the pregnancy was physically present, yet difficult for her to imagine as a future event.

Delay, routine, and constraint

The account sets this inner suspension against a life that continued outwardly. The narrator attended literature and sociology classes, ate in the university canteen, and drank coffee at La Faluche. She also tried to continue academic work, including a thesis on women in Surrealist writing, but found that she could not organize notes or produce the requested synopsis and first chapter. Routine persisted, but her capacity to inhabit it had diminished. The days were still filled with familiar obligations; they no longer carried her toward the future in the same way.

The delay had a social and legal dimension. The narrator understood her circumstances in relation to her working-class family background: higher education had spared her factory or commercial work, but, in her view, had not removed the inherited insecurity associated with poverty. The pregnancy became bound up with social stigma and a sense of failure. At the same time, the law was present throughout ordinary life—in euphemisms, judgment, and the difficulty of imagining abortion as a freely available choice. Time under those conditions was not simply personal indecision. It was time spent seeking an option in a setting where the act was criminalized and practical knowledge had to pass through private channels.

When LB gave the narrator Madame P-R’s address, the route toward an abortion acquired concrete terms: an appointment, a fee of four hundred francs, and the need to wait afterward for the intervention to take effect. LB also warned that precautions did not eliminate the risk of infection and explained the role of antibiotics. These details turned an abstract wish to end the pregnancy into a sequence of arrangements and intervals. The narrator’s progress depended on information and support from another woman, while the consequences of the procedure remained uncertain.

Memory, dates, and narrative pace

The later narrative repeatedly tests memory against time. The narrator identifies diaries and an engagement book as sources for dates and events, but recognizes that they cannot securely preserve what she thought and felt. Those interior states are difficult to recover because thoughts are abstract and transient. More durable are sensations attached to external people and things: the snow at Le Mont-Dore, Jean T’s expression, and a song associated with Sœur Sourire. In this account, recollection gains substance through such material points of contact rather than through a complete record of the past.

A journey on December 31 supplies another remembered sentence that helped orient the narrator toward the coming ordeal. A woman in the car spoke of a girl who had miscarried in a maid’s room. The narrator retained that remark, along with the rainy journey, as one of several frightening or reassuring statements—often made by strangers—that accompanied her toward what she would undergo. Memory thus preserves not only a sequence of events but also the fragments of other people’s speech that gave the future a shape.

The form of the retrospective account resists the speed with which the narrator might otherwise pass over those weeks. She describes the narrative as carrying her along a direction she did not choose, and deliberately seeks to convey the period’s sluggishness and numbness through attention to detail and analysis. The writing’s pace answers the experience’s pace: instead of treating the delay as empty time between a diagnosis and an outcome, it makes that interval the substance of the account.

Historical scale and aftermath

Looking back from a later visit to Lariboisière Hospital, the narrator recognizes the return of feelings she had experienced while awaiting Doctor N’s verdict in 1963. This recurrence makes distinct moments of uncertainty part of a longer personal chronology. She measures her life, in one formulation, by the span between the Ogino method and the era of cheap condom dispensers. The measure is both intimate and historical: changes in contraception mark the conditions under which reproductive uncertainty and choice have been lived.

The later perspective also changes the meaning of silence. The narrator observes that the end of legal prohibition does not automatically make past experience speakable; former victims may remain silent on the assumption that the matter is over. Against that disappearance, writing restores the event to a history of law, ethics, taboo, time, and bodily experience. She ultimately regards the ordeal as necessary to her later willingness to have children and to accept reproduction as part of her life. By putting the experience into words, she also releases a feeling of guilt and makes a private history intelligible to others. Time, which once seemed to close around an unwanted future, becomes through narration a way of connecting one life to those of later readers.