Roe v. Wade

The sensational 1972 “Bobigny trial” of Marie-Claire Chevalier for obtaining an illegal abortion helped decriminalize abortion in France just before Roe v.

Upon her death, President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte sent flowers to the funeral, a gesture confirming Marie-Claire’s critical role in advancing reproductive rights in France. Halimi died in 2020, just a few weeks before the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, arguably her close American counterpart. Rather than stick to the details of Marie-Claire’s case, Halimi chose to target the 1920 law that made a teenage rape victim a criminal, and in doing so turn her client’s misfortune into a groundbreaking legal precedent. On Halimi’s advice, she eventually enrolled in a remote boarding school to escape the media furor, yet discussion of the trial remained ubiquitous. (Her mother, Michèle, received only a symbolic fine that she never had to pay, and the abortionist a suspended one-year prison sentence.) 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. French women who illegally aborted (an estimated minimum of 300,000 of them every year) could expect punishment of up to two years in prison, and their abortionists up to a decade.