French criminal prohibition of abortion

The French criminal prohibition of abortion treated abortion as a misdemeanor while leaving it widespread and often clandestine. Simone de Beauvoir presents the prohibition not as an effective protection of life but as a policy that transfers the consequences of unwanted pregnancy onto women: unsafe procedures, illness, death, humiliation, and forced motherhood. Her account connects the law to a broader argument about how reproductive biology acquires its meaning through social and legal arrangements rather than determining women’s lives by itself.

Legal prohibition and social hypocrisy

In her account of motherhood and reproductive control, Beauvoir describes abortion as a familiar recourse for women who became pregnant despite precautions, particularly where contraceptive methods were rudimentary. In France, she writes, many women were forced to seek the procedure, which haunted their love lives. The law nevertheless made it a misdemeanor and compelled the operation to take place clandestinely. That legal status was part of a wider contradiction: bourgeois society accepted depictions of childbirth but treated discussion of abortion as indecent, even though Beauvoir states that abortions in France occurred in numbers comparable to births.

The prohibition also rested on an unstable account of the fetus. Arguments against abortion could present it as an autonomous being that did not belong to the pregnant woman, while defenses of motherhood could describe it as part of her body. Beauvoir sees this inconsistency as evidence that the dispute cannot be reduced to a settled moral principle. The policy’s public defense of embryonic life, in her analysis, stood beside indifference to children after birth and tolerance of serious harm within families; the law directed punishment at abortion rather than addressing the conditions that made pregnancy unwanted or children vulnerable.

Enforcement and the scale of abortion

Beauvoir emphasizes that criminal enforcement failed to stop the practice. Figures she cites estimate hundreds of thousands of abortions annually: Professors Doléris, Balthazard, and Lacassagne put the total at 500,000 around 1933; a statistic from 1938 estimated one million; and Dr. Aubertin, writing in 1941, gave a range of 800,000 to one million. Beauvoir considers the higher, later estimate closest to the truth. In a 1948 article in Combat, Dr. Desplas likewise described abortion as embedded in social custom and repression as having practically failed.

The enforcement figures reveal the distance between the legal system’s activity and the scale of the practice. For the Seine district in 1943, Desplas reported 1,300 investigations, 750 people charged, and 360 women arrested; 513 people were condemned to prison terms of one to five years, while the district was estimated to have had 15,000 abortions. He also cited 10,000 reported cases across the territory. These numbers, as Beauvoir deploys them, make the law’s failure measurable: prosecution reached only a fraction of a practice that persisted across society.

The consequences of clandestinity were not merely legal. Beauvoir notes that procedures carried out in disastrous conditions caused deaths and lasting illness, and cites a report that two women who had undergone abortions arrived each week at the Paris medical-legal institute. A competent specialist working in a clinic with appropriate precautions, she argues, did not pose the grave dangers asserted by penal law; the danger was intensified by the clandestine conditions the law produced. The distinction places risk not simply in the operation itself but in the institutional arrangement that denied women safe access.

Unequal burdens and private experience

Beauvoir also describes abortion as shaped by class. Access to contraception was more common among bourgeois women, whose homes were more likely to have bathrooms that made contraceptive practices easier. Poverty, inadequate housing, and the need for a wife to work outside the home were among the reasons women sought abortions. In a hospital account published in Les Temps Modernes in 1945, Mme Geneviève Serreau described a ward of eighteen patients who had undergone curettage; fifteen had miscarried, and half of those miscarriages were induced. One patient, a market porter’s wife, had borne ten children, only three of whom were living, and had experienced seven miscarriages, five induced. Another, a sixteen-year-old married woman, had contracted salpingitis after an abortion. These cases give material form to Beauvoir’s argument that legal prohibition did not distribute its dangers equally.

The law’s burden extended into women’s understanding of themselves. Even a woman who consented to or wanted an abortion could experience it as a sacrifice of bodily possibilities, and the criminal status of the procedure could leave her feeling dirty and humiliated. Beauvoir contrasts this embodied consequence with men’s capacity to advocate prohibition publicly while accepting abortion privately as a convenient solution. The man might plead, threaten, reason, become angry, or leave; the woman, she argues, bore the consequences in pain and blood. In this account, the law’s moral language does not remain abstract: it is made concrete in the woman’s body and in the absence of a child.

Consequences and significance

Beauvoir argues that repression could not ensure an increase in births. It instead exposed women to death, sterility, and illness while forcing some to carry pregnancies against their will. In France, where access to contraception was limited, abortion could be the only way out for women unwilling to bring children into deprivation. The prohibition thus failed on its own practical terms while worsening the conditions it claimed to address.

The argument belongs to Beauvoir’s broader account of the body as a lived situation. Biological processes matter profoundly, but they do not by themselves define a woman’s position: law, custom, material resources, and social judgments determine how those processes are experienced. Her discussion of abortion brings that distinction into focus. Pregnancy can be desired, feared, welcomed, or endured, and outward expressions do not necessarily disclose a woman’s deeper feelings. Criminal prohibition narrows her choices while concealing those contradictions, making a private and varied experience into a punishable public matter.