Simone Veil
French Minister of Health (1974–79)
In 1944, sixteen-year-old Simone Jacob was deported, along with her mother and sisters, to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in occupied Poland. Born into a French-Jewish family in Nice, France, she had just finished her baccalaureate studies. Her father, brother and mother did not survive the war, but Simone and her sisters did. After her return to France, she excelled as a law student in Paris, and soon married Antoine Veil, a civil servant. In 1974, she took up the post of Minister of Health, championing women’s rights, including increased access to contraception. Five years later, she became the first woman to be elected President of the European Parliament.
In all of Veil’s extraordinary career, she is best remembered for her successful effort to legalize abortion in France. Before 1975, the practice was illegal and highly stigmatized (one of the last women to be guillotined in the country was Marie-Louise Giraud, a struggling mother during the Vichy regime, who performed at least twenty-seven abortions before 1943). In the French Parliament, in 1974, before a room filled almost entirely with men, Veil explained the reasoning behind a bill which would legalize abortion for women in the first ten weeks of pregnancy (later expanded to twelve). She framed the debate in careful terms, suggesting that the new law – the ‘Veil law’, as it came to be known – would only be making safer procedures which were already taking place. At the time of her death in 2017, at the age of eighty-nine, she had established herself as one of France’s most widely admired public figures. In 2018, in a grand public ceremony, she was buried in the Panthéon, in Paris, alongside seventy-two of France’s best-loved men and just four women, including Marie Curie (see here).
Speech to Parliament on Abortion Law 1974
Mr President, ladies, gentlemen; if I stand here today before this parliament, as health minister, as a woman and as a non-parliamentarian, to propose to the elected members of this country a profound change to the legislation on abortion, then believe me that it is with a deep sense of humility – facing both the difficulties of the problem itself, and indeed the strength of the very personal feelings that this subject evokes in every French man and woman, as well as being fully aware of the weight of responsibility that we are going to take on together.
But it is also with the strongest possible conviction that I will defend a project [which aims] to bring about a considered and human solution to one of the most difficult problems of our time.
… We have come to a point where, on this matter, the public authorities can no longer shirk their responsibilities. All the facts support this: the studies and work over the past several years, the commission hearings, the experiences of other European countries. And most of you can sense it – knowing that we can no longer stop illegal abortions, and yet nor can we apply criminal law against all the women who would be punishable by its rules.
… I say we are in a situation of chaos and anarchy that cannot go on.
… I say most sincerely: abortion must remain the exception, the last resort in a hopeless situation. But how can we condone abortion without it losing this special status, without society appearing to encourage it?
I would like first of all to share with you a belief held by all women – and I am sorry to do so before an Assembly almost exclusively made up of men: any woman seeking an abortion does so with a heavy heart. You just have to listen to the women….
… Currently, who looks after those women who find themselves in this situation? The law sends them away not only in disgrace, shame and isolation, but also into the anonymity and anxiety of legal proceedings. Forced to hide their pregnancy, all too often they find nobody to listen to them, advise them and give them support and protection.
Among those who today are fighting against any eventual modification of this punitive law, how many of those are concerned with helping these women in their distress? How many of those can think beyond what they might see as an offence, and have learned to show young single mothers the understanding and moral support that they really need?
… I say we are in a situation of chaos and anarchy that cannot go on.
Simone Veil