Fifty years after the vote of the Velo Law by decriminalizing the voluntary termination of pregnancy, the Senate adopted this Thursday, March 20, a text to rehabilitate women convicted of having illegally aborted before 1975.
A year after the registration of “guaranteed freedom” to abort in the Constitution, senators approved a new message to recognize the “suffering” of women victims of laws that attack their freedom.
The bill of the Socialist Group, transported by former Women’s Minister Laurence Rossignol, was unanimously adopted for the first reading of the afternoon, with the support of the Government. It is transmitted to the National Assembly.
The text intends that the State be recognized that the laws in force before 1975 have constituted “an attack on the protection of women’s health, sexual and reproductive autonomy” or even “women’s rights”, and that have led to “many deaths” and summer sources of “physical and moral suffering.”
“The shame must change the camps”
This text, “is a way of saying that shame must change the fields, that these laws were criminals,” said Laurence Rossignol, who defends “a commemorative approach after decades of shame and silence.”
“While the defense of the right to abortion is questioned in the world, everyone must be counted that there are countries that do not bend,” insists the Senator of Val-de-Marne.
His bill also proposes the creation of a committee to recognize the damage suffered by women who have abortion, responsible for contributing to the “collection” and the “transmission of memory” of women forced to clandestine abortions and those who helped them.
The minister delegated for equality between women and men, Aurore Bergé, praised an “act of tribute” to “do justice to those who fought in the shadows, to those who paid the price of their freedom, sometimes of their lives, the simple right to get rid of themselves.” In particular, he mentioned before the senators the story of his own mother, who had clandestinely aborted.
A text that “repairs injustice”
This initiative realizes an appeal published in January in Liberation at the time of the 50th anniversary of the Veil Law, which has already requested this rehabilitation.
It was signed by a collective of political, artistic and feminist personalities, including the writer and the Nobel Prize for Literature Annie Ernaux, the actresses Anna Mouglalis and Laure Calamy and the president of the Foundation of Women Anne-Cécile Mailfert.
For the latter, this text “repairs an injustice.” “We are talking about more than 11,000 people convicted, it is essential to be able to rehabilitate them, to tell them ‘we should never have convicted him for having exercised his freedom,” he told AFP.
The initiative also gives the body a request from the Women’s Foundation on this subject, asking “to repair a historical injustice” and that collected 9,000 signatures on Wednesday night.
Compensation is not provided
Women’s rights associations welcomed this proposal. “This is a very good sign: at a time when a midwife has just been stopped in Texas for having practiced abortions, France goes exactly in the opposite direction,” Suzy Rojtman, spokesman for the National Collective of Women’s Rights, spokesman for AFP.
For Sarah Durocher, president of the family schedule, this “will do some dignity” to women “who have lived in silence.”
The text does not provide compensation for compensating the persons involved by this law. A purpose, “because there were not only friends of women who practiced abortions,” says Laurence Rossignol, who evokes the “mothers’ cabins” or “pimps” who have practiced clandestine abortions.
A parallel initiative of the Socialist Senators, to rehabilitate people convicted of homosexuality due to the discriminatory laws in force between 1942 and 1982 in France, has already prospered in the two cameras of Parliament in recent months. The Senate will examine it at Second Reading on May 6.
Source: BFM TV
