The U.S. and France offer starkly different environments for women—but both countries share a strong feminist tradition. How do we explain their radically different abortion trajectories?
In 1971, 343 women, mostly well-known public figures—writers, actors, artists, journalists, doctors and lawyers—published a manifesto in the widely circulated magazinebroadcasting that they had undergone illegal abortions. Another publicly circulated manifesto signed by 252 doctors proclaimed women’s right to terminate pregnancies. Public meetings in favor of abortion as well as successful legal challenges to the 1920 law ultimately led to the passage of the Veil Law in 1975.
Over the next several decades, Parliament gradually eliminated or modified these restrictions, and made abortion fully subsidized by France’s social security system. There are likely a multitude of contributing factors. For example, France is a small and highly centralized country with more latitude in national policy making, while in the U.S., as we have seen, states have had the latitude to push back against, ultimately chipping away at the scope of federal constitutional protection for the abortion right.
With the rise of the New Right, , as Carol Mason writes in her book, “pro-life politics went from defense to offense” and “right-wing politicians and evangelicals used abortion as the issue around which to mobilize .”
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