Gisèle Halimi put France's abortion ban on trial at Bobigny

Person: Gisèle Halimi
Lived: 1927–2020
Field: Law, women's rights
From: Tunisian-French

The story

Under a law passed in 1920, abortion was a crime in France, and so was helping a woman obtain one. The law fell hardest on women without money: wealthier women could travel abroad or find a discreet doctor, while poorer women turned to clandestine procedures that endangered their health and their lives. Gisèle Halimi, a Paris lawyer born into a Jewish family in Tunisia, knew this from experience. At 19 she had undergone an illegal abortion performed brutally, without anesthetic.

In April 1971 she was the only lawyer among the 343 women who signed a public manifesto declaring that they had had abortions and demanding the right to contraception and abortion. Because the signers could be prosecuted, she founded the association Choisir la cause des femmes with Simone de Beauvoir, the biologist Jean Rostand and others, to defend them and to campaign for changing the law.

The test case came in 1972. Marie-Claire Chevalier, a 16-year-old from the Paris suburbs, had become pregnant after being raped by a classmate. Her mother, a single parent who worked on the Paris metro, and friends helped her obtain an abortion, and they were prosecuted along with her. Halimi agreed to defend them and set out to put the 1920 law itself on trial. She called scientists, including Nobel laureates, as well as writers and actresses to testify, and argued that the law punished poor women while the privileged escaped. In her closing speech she told the court that she, too, had had an abortion.

Marie-Claire was acquitted. Two friends who had helped her were acquitted as well, and her mother received only a suspended sentence. The verdicts were reported across the country and showed that the 1920 law had lost the support of the public and even of the courts. Two years later Health Minister Simone Veil carried the law legalizing abortion through Parliament; it was passed in December 1974 and promulgated in January 1975. Historians and commentators widely regard the Bobigny trial as one of the decisive steps that made the Veil law possible.

In 1973 Choisir published an account of the trial, with a preface by Simone de Beauvoir, so that its arguments would remain available to others, and the case has since been retold on stage, on television and in film.

Why it matters

The Bobigny trial helped win French women the legal right to safe abortion under the 1975 Veil law, a right that France has since written into its Constitution.

About Gisèle Halimi

Tunisian-born French lawyer whose courtroom battles helped legalize abortion in France and led to the 1980 law that finally treated rape as a serious crime.

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Gisèle Halimi

1927–2020 · Law, women's rights

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