In France, the sacred date for abortion rights advocates is 1972, the year of the “Bobigny trial” that helped decriminalize abortion in the country, three months before the Roe v. Wade ruling. At the center of the trial was a 16-year-old girl.
At the center of the trial, which captivated the French public, was Marie-Claire Chevalier, a 16-year-old girl who became pregnant when she was raped by a classmate. Marie-Claire came from a working-class family in north-central France. The young man who had raped her dealt in petty crime, and — with shocking success — turned her in to the police so he could escape charges for stealing a car.
In the early 1970s, in the ferment of feminism’s “second wave,” most of Halimi’s energy turned toward fighting the criminalization of abortion, which in 1955 had been declared legal only in strict medical circumstances. That regulation followed a law from 1920, which, seeking to rebuild the population after the immense losses of the First World War, had banned all voluntary terminations and contraception in France.
By soliciting Halimi to represent them, Michèle and Marie-Claire Chevalier allowed their ordeal to be politicized and to become a symbolic moment for women’s rights.
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