Working-class origins and social stigma

Working-class origins and social stigma are central to the narrator’s account of her clandestine abortion. Her family background informs how she interprets her pregnancy, while poverty and the criminal prohibition on abortion restrict the help available to her. In doctors’ offices and a hospital, class also determines how her distress is read and how she is treated. The narrative connects these private encounters to a wider hierarchy in which education may alter a person’s status, but does not reliably protect her from the consequences of poverty or from judgment about reproduction.

Inherited class position and pregnancy

The narrator was born into a family of laborers and shopkeepers and became the first in it to pursue higher education. Her baccalauréat and liberal-arts degree offered a route away from factory work and commerce, but she did not experience education as having erased her origins. She understood the pregnancy as linked to what she called the legacy of working-class poverty: the condition she feared was not only a private crisis but also a mark of social failure. In her account, class is felt through the body and through the limited choices attached to it, rather than described as an abstract economic category.

That association also troubles her sense of intellectual achievement. Before the pregnancy, she had taken pride in handling abstract ideas and expected a life among books. During the crisis she could no longer organize her thesis notes or meet her tutor’s request for a synopsis and first chapter. Her diary recorded that she could not write or work and could not see a way out. The loss of academic concentration frightened her more than the need to obtain an abortion: it seemed to signal that she had ceased to be an intellectual. She wonders whether this collapse reflects the working-class world’s wariness of intellectual labor, her own bodily experience, or both. The account thus presents education as real but precarious cultural advancement, not a clean escape from class inheritance.

Unequal access to medical help

The narrator’s search for assistance unfolds under Criminalization of abortion in France, a system that exposed both women and providers to punishment. She believed that doctors would not risk their careers for women who had little money or influence. Her encounter with a general practitioner in Rouen seemed to confirm that judgment: after establishing that she was pregnant, he prescribed treatment that she hoped would bring on bleeding, but did not offer the abortion she needed. When he learned she was a student, he shifted to asking whether she knew the son of a friend. The visit ended without a practical route to care.

The narrator interprets this failure as structural rather than as a simple misunderstanding. A doctor’s professional security, she reasons, stood against the danger of helping a poor, unconnected young woman. The law shaped the encounter even though it was not discussed directly: it made concealment and euphemism part of the exchange, and made access depend on resources and personal connections unavailable to her. Her eventual path to help came through women who shared practical knowledge, not through a straightforward medical referral.

LB gave her the address of Madame P-R, a paramedic who performed abortions, and lent her the four hundred francs required. LB also explained that she had developed septicemia after her own procedure and advised the narrator to obtain antibiotics. The narrator already had a penicillin prescription from another doctor. This exchange illustrates both the value and the limits of informal support: another woman could provide an address, money, and experience, but neither a dependable system of care nor freedom from medical danger. The account treats such knowledge as consequential work performed by women whose expertise remained unrecognized.

Concealment, respectability, and evidence

At weekends the narrator continued visiting her parents. Hiding her condition did not seem unusual within a relationship already marked by concealment since adolescence. Her mother belonged to a generation shaped by ideas of sexual sin and shame, and the narrator expected those beliefs to be immovable. Regular visits, a broad smile, a composed appearance, and the exchange of laundry for provisions helped preserve the appearance of ordinary family life. The episode shows respectability being maintained through familiar gestures while the central fact remained unspoken.

The narrator’s material records complicate that silence. She retained dates and evidence in her diary and engagement book, and she later found medical-journal references written in blue ballpoint on the first page of her address book. Their physical persistence mattered to her because the marks seemed capable of conveying reality in a way that recollection alone could not. She likewise identifies concrete sensations and objects, including the snow at Le Mont-Dore, as evidence through which the past becomes recoverable. Class stigma is therefore recorded not only in explicit encounters but in the ordinary traces that remain after an experience others had reason to conceal.

Class judgment in the hospital

After the abortion, severe bleeding led to a night doctor’s intervention and transfer to Hôtel-Dieu Hospital. The doctor demanded an explanation, ordered her to promise not to repeat the act, and directed her to the hospital rather than the clinic she preferred. The narrator’s recollection makes the encounter an instance of authority exercised over someone who had few alternatives. She had attempted to manage the situation privately; the emergency brought her under institutional scrutiny.

A young surgeon treated her harshly during the operation. The narrator later learned that he had assumed she was an ordinary working woman rather than a university student; he discovered her student status only afterward, probably through her student-union card. His embarrassment, as she understood it, arose from having treated a student as he would a salesgirl or factory worker. The change in his response did not undo the treatment. Instead, it exposed a hierarchy in which the same patient could receive different regard depending on the class identity a professional believed her to have.

A nurse on night duty reinforced that hierarchy from another direction. She asked why the narrator had not told the doctor that she was from the same world as him, treating disclosure of her student status as the missing explanation for his conduct. The narrator partly accepted the implication that she should have made her position known. The nurse also told her she was better off after the abortion, the only comforting words the narrator recalls from the hospital. She did not interpret this as straightforward solidarity among women; she connected it to a belief that people in high places could put themselves above the law. The scene holds care and class deference together without resolving their tension.

From stigma to testimony

The narrator’s account ultimately turns class-marked experience into a challenge to the silence surrounding clandestine abortion. She recalls how abortion could remain obscured even after the law changed: once a restriction was removed, former victims might be expected to say that the matter was over, leaving the experience hidden again. Her narrative instead follows the consequences of poverty, limited access, and unequal treatment through specific encounters, from the unsuccessful medical consultation to the hospital’s judgments.

Writing also changes the meaning of what happened to her. She describes having shed the guilt that the event had occurred to her and that she had done nothing about it, and considers that the experience may have happened so that it could be recounted. Her aim is to make bodily sensations and thought intelligible beyond her own life. In this account, education does not cancel working-class origins, and retrospective narration does not erase the stigma or danger. It gives a public form to what those forces had helped keep private, making the unequal conditions of reproductive choice visible through the material details of one life.