Is it nonetheless vital to speak about abortion? For greater than 50 years, cinema and literature have informed the tale of the struggle for abortion, given girls a voice and condemned the assaults. Transmitting collective reminiscence, breaking taboos and exposing the methods of ultraconservative actions, those works remind us that abortion isn’t just a criminal proper, however a political and cultural combat this is nonetheless related nowadays.
In December 2025, the Ecu Parliament licensed the “My Voice, My Choice” initiative supported through 1.2 million signatures in 19 member states and followed a answer calling for a Ecu unity mechanism to ensure secure and criminal abortion for all Ecu girls. An estimated 20 million girls in Europe nonetheless do not need simple get right of entry to to this proper to keep an eye on their our bodies.
Regulations essential to protect the suitable to abortion
In 2025, France celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the 1975 Veil Legislation, which permits voluntary termination of being pregnant (IVG), below positive prerequisites. As a result of rankings of ladies died from clandestine abortions in France till the Nineteen Seventies.
Since then, the legislation has developed and got rid of many stumbling blocks, particularly the extension of the criminal duration that permits the usage of abortion. To any extent further, France is even the primary nation to incorporate within the charter on March 8, 2024:
“The legislation establishes the prerequisites below which the liberty assured to a lady to lodge to voluntary termination of being pregnant is discovered.
On the other hand, the charter isn’t an entire protect. The legislation would possibly cut back the instances that let recourse to abortion, as is the case in Poland the place abortion can simplest be carried out if the being pregnant is the results of sexual attack, incest or if it poses an immediate danger to the lifestyles or well being of the mummy.
The upward thrust of ultraconservative assaults on abortion in France
Teams paintings to invade public house with messages in contrast proper.
In 2023 Paris, a bunch of “survivors” put anti-abortion stickers on Vélibs in Paris after which went directly to make wild poster collages within the subway.
Fighters of abortion additionally take to social media, via influencers and create disinformation websites and hotlines, with the purpose of convincing girls to surrender.
Say you do not omit
In step with Drees, in 2024, 251,270 voluntary abortions have been carried out in France. To ensure that this proper to cast off one’s frame and one’s lifestyles to stay efficient, it can be crucial to not make it a taboo topic. Cinema and literature are very important for spreading girls’s recollections, wisdom, phrases and reports.
The cinema reminds us of historic battles for the liberty to cast off one’s frame. He was once at the leading edge of the combat through secretly distributing Histoire d’A, through Charles Belmont and Marielle Issartel. In 1973, this documentary raised consciousness of the deeds and movements of MLAC (Motion for Freedom from Abortion and Birth control). Banned through the then minister accountable for tradition, this movie was once broadcast in secret screenings.
The cinema additionally confirmed the observe of clandestine abortions, together with the ones of “angel creators” hidden in kitchens, with non-medicalized tools (knitting needles, hangers, and so on.), as in Une affair de femmes, Claude Chabrola (1988), with Isabelle Huppert, or the English movie Mistletoe Le Drake2 (Mistletoe Le04) Staunton.
The radical L’Evenement, through Anna Ernot, was once revealed in 2000, however it’s about abortion within the Nineteen Sixties. It was once dropped at the display screen through Audrey Divan in 2021.
He additionally highlighted the plight of younger women in the hunt for abortion, nameless folks, in Une chante, l’autre pas through Agnes Varda (1977) or in L’Evenement, Audrey Divan (2021), an adaptation of Annie Ernauk’s novel, which tells a couple of pupil’s repeated abortion190.
In 2022, unity inside secret networks of mutual support was once the point of interest of 2 motion pictures: Name Jane in america, with Sigourney Waver and Annie Colere in France, with Laure Calami. Blandine Lenoir’s French movie is in regards to the MLAC (Actions for the Freedom to Get rid of Your Frame) who aspired to coach non-medical girls within the Karman means and arranged journeys to London or Amsterdam.
After all, the battles of courageous feminine figures, who fought to protect the liberty of alternative girls to cast off their our bodies, resulted in the portrait of Simone Veil in Simone le voiage du siecle through Olivier Dahan (2022), or Giselle Halima in Le Proces de Bobigny, through Francois Luciano, whose Charroa Luciano6, and within the biography of Charo Luciano (200) scheduled for liberate in cinemas in 2026.
The cinema published what those secret abortions are, avoidable deaths, and confirmed that the suitable is the results of a collective combat. It will be significant to not omit this truth. In step with the International Well being Group (WHO), unsafe abortions at the moment are the reason for loss of life for round 39,000 girls international each and every yr.
Being attentive to girls: breaking down the boundaries and taboos of guilt
“No woman resorts to abortion willingly. Just listen to the women.”
That is what Giselle Halimi states in her guide The Reason for Ladies.
Literature mentioned girls’s illnesses in Victor Schlogel’s Victory or the Ache of Ladies (1999), L’Evenement through Anne Erno (2000), Dik sept ans, Colombe Schneck (2015), to Sophie Adriansen’s novel Le Ciel de Joi (2025).
Literature as soon as once more addressed the query of the person’s freedom to make a choice his frame, his lifestyles and the suitable to freedom of moral sense relating to politics. Françoise Verger in Le Ventre des femmes: Capitalism, Racism, Feminism (2017) confirmed how the remedy of black girls driven into abortion through “misogynoir”, i.e. misogyny and anti-black racism, contrasted with the stigmatization of white aborted girls.
The caricature “Le Choeur des femmes”, through Od Mermilli, is an adaptation of Martin Winkler’s novel.
After all, literature highlighted the significance of scientific admission and paying attention to girls, as an example in Martin Winkler’s Ladies’s Choir, tailored right into a graphic novel through Ode Mermiliod (2021).
Abortion is simplest trauma if we make it annoying via an exhausting adventure, a guilt-inducing reception. It is crucial to coach docs, identify high quality services and products and take away the double moral sense clause, explicit to abortion, as demanded through the Nationwide Faculty of French Gynecologists and Obstetricians. Sociologists Marie Mathieu and Laurine Thizi in The Sociology of Abortion (2023) and Raphael Perrin, in The Option to Abortion, Scientific Regulate and Ladies’s Our bodies (2025), insist at the significance of coaching all well being employees. A lady should have the ability to freely select, with out the duty to offer justification, a scientific or instrumental abortion in a health center.
With the intention to allow each and every individual to make an educated selection, it’s suitable to denounce the alarmist guilt-inducing projections and to teach about understood and regulated sexuality, from faculty onwards, inside reputable graduate methods of schooling on emotional, relational lifestyles and sexuality (EVARS) that allow the prevention and avoidance of abortion.
Associations and circle of relatives making plans also are key venues for dialogue to tell and enhance girls, however had been significantly undermined through finances cuts.
The legislation below force: condemning attack
Lately, new assaults in this proper also are the topic of flicks and documentaries. The Counterattack of the Crusaders (2017), through Alexandre Jousa and Andre Rollins-Gaston, and even Worry within the Abdomen (2025), through Léa Clermont-Dion, disclose the ability of those tough lobbies. After tackling the cyber-harassment of ladies in Hail Slut: Misogyny within the Virtual Age, this Quebec director denounces, in Worry within the Abdomen, the propaganda of those “anti-choice” teams that experience come to Canada from america. By means of parodying the discourse of human rights, below the false pretext of protecting lifestyles, they assault the suitable to abortion and euthanasia, in addition to the rights of LGBTKIA+. With surprising slogans and macabre photographs, they are trying to make girls really feel to blame and intimidate docs, with the purpose of selling a retrograde social imaginative and prescient.
Tell, inform, put across: literature and cinema don’t simply enhance the suitable to abortion, they protect it. By means of giving voice to girls, bearing the reminiscence of previous struggles and exposing recent assaults, they remind us that this proper is rarely earned and is topic to consistent assaults.
In December 2025, the parliament rehabilitated girls convicted of abortion earlier than 1975. A undertaking was once introduced to erect a Parisian monument devoted to 1000’s of ladies who died in secret abortions, reminding, within the nation of human rights, the significance of the suitable to freely cast off one’s frame, lifestyles and moral sense.
This text was once written in collaboration with Véronique Sehier, former co-president of the Division of Circle of relatives Making plans, rapporteur for the Financial, Social and Environmental Council (Cese) learn about “Sexual and reproductive rights in Europe: between threats and progress” revealed in 2019.
