Working-class origins and social position

The narrator’s working-class origins remain consequential even after education has carried her beyond the work and commerce associated with her family. During her clandestine abortion, class shapes her sense of stigma, her limited access to medical help, and the unequal treatment she receives in medical settings. In retrospect, she makes these experiences evidence of how social position can persist beneath apparent mobility and condition who is treated as worthy of care.

Background and Class Position

The narrator was born into a family of laborers and shopkeepers and was the first in it to pursue higher education. Her secondary-school qualification and liberal-arts degree spared her factory work and commerce, but did not, in her view, erase the poverty attached to her background. She connects her circumstances to a working-class inheritance that education could not simply cancel.

She understands her predicament not only as a private misfortune but as a mark of social failure. That interpretation exposes a tension between educational mobility and the social judgments that continue to attach to class: she has crossed into higher education, yet does not feel free of the disadvantages and stigma she associates with her origins.

Law and Access to Care

In the period described, abortion was criminalized, and the law shaped access to care as well as public judgment. The narrator recalls that people often judged abortion according to the law rather than questioning the law itself. Its influence appeared in euphemistic language, shame, and the difficulty of imagining that women might one day be able to obtain an abortion freely. Years later, she also observes that legal change did not automatically end silence: former victims could remain quiet on the assumption that the ordeal was over, leaving the experience shrouded in secrecy.

The narrator links this legal climate to the reluctance of doctors to help women without money or connections. In her account, such patients were reminders of the risk a doctor could face under the law, including imprisonment and the loss of a medical practice. She considers both professional self-preservation and strict adherence to the law as possible explanations for their refusal, while stressing the unequal stakes: a doctor risked a career, whereas a woman might proceed without safe assistance. In one encounter, Doctor N would not take part in the abortion but prescribed penicillin in connection with the operation, a limited form of harm reduction that stopped short of open assistance.

Informal Support and the Cost of Help

When the narrator had largely given up hope, LB came to see her after Jean T had passed on that she needed help. LB provided the address of Madame P-R, a paramedic who worked at a clinic and offered clandestine abortions. She explained the practical arrangements and the risks she knew from experience, and lent the narrator the four hundred francs charged for the service. The loan mattered: access depended not only on finding a provider but also on having someone able and willing to supply the money.

Madame P-R’s manner further contrasts with the moral and institutional judgments surrounding the narrator. At their meeting, she concentrated on essential practical matters, including the timing, fee, and method, without probing or moralizing. The narrator found this narrow focus reassuring. For Madame P-R, the work also carried risks and involved expertise that could not be publicly acknowledged; the fee reflected, in the narrator’s later interpretation, both those risks and the shame associated with the service. Informal support thus offered a route to care, but one shaped by secrecy, cost, and vulnerability.

Class Hierarchy in Medical Encounters

The narrator’s treatment in hospital makes class distinctions explicit. After she was taken there, the intern who had treated her in the operating room later appeared embarrassed. She initially understood his embarrassment as remorse for his conduct, but learned that he had discovered only afterward that she was a college student. He had treated her, she concluded, as he would an ordinary salesgirl or factory worker because he did not know her educational status.

A night nurse reinforced this interpretation by asking why the narrator had not told the doctor that they came from the same social world. The nurse presented the intern’s reaction as surprise that the narrator had not disclosed her student identity; the narrator, for a time, accepted the implication that she had contributed to his aggression by failing to do so. The exchange reveals how education could function as a credential that altered treatment, even when the patient’s immediate need was unchanged. The nurse’s later reassurance that the narrator was better off after the abortion offered a rare moment of comfort, but the narrator understood it through a prevailing belief that people in high positions could put themselves above the law.

The surgeon’s dismissive insult in the operating room became another lasting sign of hierarchy. The narrator connects its force to the divide it seemed to enforce between doctors, on one side, and workers or women seeking abortions, on the other: those with authority and those subject to it. The insult’s persistence in memory makes the encounter more than a personal slight; it condenses the unequal power of the institution into a single remembered sentence.

Memory and Narrative Significance

The narrator reconstructs these class relations through both memory and material evidence. Her address book preserves magazine references written in blue ballpoint, while remembered impressions of people and things—including Jean T and the ballad of Sœur Sourire—help anchor what might otherwise remain difficult to verify. These traces do not erase uncertainty about past thoughts, but they give the account concrete points of contact with an experience shaped by social conditions.

Writing eventually changes the narrator’s relation to the stigma surrounding the event. She says she has shed the guilt that it happened to her and that she did nothing about it, and presents the act of recounting as a way to make bodily experience intelligible beyond her individual life. In this account, class is neither a background label nor a condition overcome once education is attained. It is a force visible in access to care, in the treatment accorded to patients, and in the struggle to turn a silenced experience into public knowledge.