- Person
- Simone Veil
- Lived
- 1927–2017
- Field
- Rights and public health
- From
- French
The story
Simone Veil was born Simone Jacob in Nice in 1927 into a non-religious Jewish family. At sixteen she was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau with her mother and sister; her mother died in Bergen-Belsen, and her father and brother were deported and never seen again. After the war she studied law, became a magistrate and worked to improve conditions for women in prison and women’s rights in family law.
In 1974 President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing made her minister of health. Abortion had been a crime in France since the Napoleonic era, yet women continued to undergo illegal and often dangerous abortions. Veil first widened access to contraception and then, on November 26, 1974, presented a bill to permit abortion under specific conditions to a National Assembly of 481 men and nine women.
Her opening speech was calm and measured. She argued that abortion should remain an exception, a last resort for desperate situations, and that the law aimed to control it and as far as possible to dissuade women from it. Apologising for speaking on behalf of women before an assembly almost entirely of men, she said that no woman resorts to abortion lightheartedly. The debate was ferocious. Opponents compared the bill to Nazi crimes, a cruel charge against a camp survivor, and swastikas were daubed on her car. Many deputies of the governing majority voted against it, and it passed on November 29, 1974, by 284 votes to 189 thanks to the opposition. It became law on January 17, 1975, and is still known as the Loi Veil.
The law brought abortion out of back rooms and into hospitals and clinics, where doctors could carry it out safely, and it made France the first predominantly Catholic country to decriminalise abortion. Opponents of abortion continue to contest its principle, but in France it is widely regarded as a cornerstone of women’s rights. In 2018 Veil and her husband were reburied in the Panthéon.
Why it matters
The Loi Veil replaced dangerous illegal abortions with regulated medical care, protecting the health and lives of women in France.
About Simone Veil
Auschwitz survivor who, as France’s health minister, passed the 1975 law giving women safe, legal abortion, then became the first president of the directly elected European Parliament.
Sources
- Simone Veil obituary The Guardian
- Obituary: Simone Veil The Jewish Chronicle
- Simone Veil (1927–2017) Museum of Contraception and Abortion (MUVS)
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.