Criminalization of abortion in France

The Criminalization of abortion in France is presented in The Second Sex as both a legal restriction and a revealing contradiction in the gender order. The ban makes women legally responsible for abortion while, in the book’s account, men’s demands and the unequal conditions of intimate relationships can help create the circumstances in which women seek one. Its significance lies in the distance between a public moral code and the private conduct on which that code tacitly depends.

Legal and Historical Setting

The book places the restriction within a longer history in which women’s status is shaped by family authority, property, and the state. In ancient Rome, the subordination of women to patrimony and the family was reinforced by guardianship: a woman’s father or male relatives controlled her affairs, and marriage could transfer authority to her husband. Later legal forms altered the precise allocation of power without ending women’s dependence on male guardians or family structures.

The French revolutionary period briefly loosened some constraints, but the subsequent reorganization of society restored and formalized women’s subordination. The Napoleonic Code treated women primarily through their roles as wives and mothers, imposed harsh conditions on unmarried mothers and illegitimate children, and subjected married women to extensive marital authority. The book describes this legal settlement as a major brake on emancipation, setting the background against which reproductive control and criminal prohibitions must be understood.

The Ban and Its Contradictions

The book’s sharpest criticism concerns the mismatch between the law’s condemnation of abortion and the conduct of men who, it argues, often place women in situations where abortion becomes necessary. In some cases, a husband or lover imposes that solution; in others, men tacitly assume that a woman will resort to it if circumstances require. The criminal rule therefore does not operate as a simple expression of shared moral conviction: it assigns the danger and blame to women while leaving men’s contribution to the circumstances less visible.

This contradiction belongs to a broader pattern of sexual double standards. Men may publicly praise chastity, fidelity, and population growth while privately expecting exceptions to those principles. The book argues that women are then expected to carry the moral and legal burden of conduct that men have encouraged or relied upon. Abortion’s criminal status thus exposes how a rule can uphold an official ideal while private life proceeds through violations that the social order quietly accommodates.

Reform and the Limits of Legal Change

The book traces the uneven development of French marital and reproductive law. Divorce, restored in 1884 after its abolition during the Restoration, remained difficult to obtain; moreover, adultery remained a criminal offense only when committed by a wife. Reforms to married women’s legal status followed in 1938 and 1942, including the abolition of the wife’s duty of obedience, but the father retained headship of the family and equality between spouses remained unrealized. These changes illustrate the book’s distinction between formal rights and the concrete power to exercise them.

The account also notes the French abortion ban introduced under laws of June 1936 and reinforced on June 7, 1941, alongside the near suppression of divorce. The measures belong to a political and moral order that bound women to the home even as women’s participation in productive work and public life was changing. Their effects cannot be separated from that wider arrangement: reproductive decisions were regulated within a society that continued to distribute authority and responsibility unequally.

Historical and Thematic Significance

The ban supports the book’s larger historical claim that women’s condition has been made through institutions and interests rather than secured by an unchanging feminine essence. Women’s legal status, the author argues, has repeatedly reflected men’s projects, fears, and needs. The family, private property, and state power all help shape the conditions under which women can make decisions about reproduction.

The book also stresses that abstract legal principles do not by themselves describe lived circumstances. A woman may formally possess a right yet lack the economic independence or social power needed to act on it; conversely, a prohibition may declare a moral boundary without preventing the private practices that sustain the system. The Criminalization of abortion in France is therefore significant not only as a restriction, but as an instance of the broader contradiction between men’s public authority over moral rules and women’s exposure to their practical consequences.