Manifesto of the 343

In April 1971, Simone de Beauvoir's manifesto was published in the magazine Nouvel Obervateur, signed by 342 more women - filmmakers, writers, actresses, philosophers, singers - (including Simone Veil, Gisèle Halimi, Francoise Sagan and Catherine Deneuve) - all of them risking prison at the time since they were openly stating that they had had an abortion which again had been a crime since 1810 based on a Napoleonic law. Some of them lost their jobs, others lost contact to their families who stopped talking to them. The women were accused of being irresponsible and were called sl*ts (the manifesto is also known as the "Manifesto of the 343 Sl*ts", the Vatican Radio said France was going down the road of genocide. 

According to the manifesto, one million women were resorted to unsafe abortion each year in France alone; "I declare that I am one of them," the manifesto said. Hundreds of thousands of women underwent illegal abortions in France every year, those with money went to private clinics or to doctors abroad, others - most of them - ended up on kitchen tables of so-called angel-makers risking both prison time and their lives since there were medical risks. For a brief period of time, there was the death sentence. The last execution (by guillotine) for abortion took place in 1943. 

In November 1974, Simone Veil (nèe Jacob, 1927-2017), health minister at the time, presented a law that would legalise abortion. Veil was attacked personally, one conservative deputy compared her to Hitler. Veil was a Jewish survivor of the death camps Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. In 1975, the bill became law (via and via).

Much of the aggression was aimed personally at Veil and her family and smacked of antisemitism; it came from all sides, from members of the Parliament on the floor to anonymous letters to her office and her home. The most abhorrent remarks even compared the legalization of abortion to the Holocaust. The anonymous attacks included swastikas painted on her car and the elevator in her building and letters condemning her children to hell. At about the same time, Parliament also voted to ban laboratory experiments on animals for commercial purposes; during debate on that issue, certain members openly likened what they called the genocide of animals to the “genocide” of babies and to the genocide of Auschwitz. The worst comment she remembered from the time was one made by Jean-Marie Daillet, a member of Parliament, who asked if she would agree to the idea of throwing embryos into crematorium ovens. However, at the same time, and in the years afterward, many others paid tribute to her, approaching her even in the street to thank her and tell her she would never be forgotten for all she had done. (via)

Manifesto of the 343 (excerpts):

One million women in France have abortions every year. Condemned to secrecy they do so in dangerous conditions, while under medical supervision this is one of the simplest procedures. We are silencing these millions of women. I declare that I am one of them. I declare that I have had an abortion. Just as we demand free access to contraception, we demand the freedom to have an abortion. (...)

It’s a women’s thing, like cooking, diapers, something dirty. The fight to obtain free abortion on demand feels somehow ridiculous or petty. It can’t shake the smell of hospitals or food, or of poo behind women’s backs. The complexity of the emotions linked to the fight for abortion precisely indicate our difficulty in being, the pain that we have in persuading ourselves that it is worth the trouble of fighting for ourselves. (...)

It is out of vital necessity that women should win back control and reintegrate their bodies. They hold a unique status in history: human beings who, in modern societies, do not have unfettered control over their own bodies. Up until today it was only slaves who held this status. The scandal continues. Each year 1,500,000 women live in shame and despair. 5,000 of us die. But the moral order remains steadfast. We want to scream. (...)

The ten commandments of the Bourgeois State: 

You choose a fetus over a human being when that human is female.
No woman will have an abortion while Debré wants 100 million more French people.
You will have 100 million French people, as long as it costs you nothing.
You will be particularly severe with poor females who cannot go to England.
As such you will have a wheel of unemployment to make your capitalists happy.
You will be very moralistic, because God knows what ‘we’ women would do if we had such freedom.
You will save the fetus, since it’s more interesting to kill them off aged 18, the age of conscription.
You will really need them as you pursue your imperialist politics.
You use contraception yourself, to send just a few children to the Polytechnique or the ENA because your flat only has 10 rooms.
As for the others, you will disparage the pill, because that’s the only thing missing.

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photograph of Simone Veil via