Reproductive Rights in France
On 4 March 2024, the legislators of the French Fifth Republic made history by expanding article 34 of the French constitution to state that “the law determines the conditions under which may be exercised the liberty guaranteed to a woman to have recourse to a voluntary interruption of pregnancy.” (“La loi détermine les conditions dans lesquelles s’exerce la liberté garantie à la femme d’avoir recours à une interruption volontaire de grossesse.”)
The following selection of articles offers a variety of contexts for the recent French decision by introducing a series of earlier French discussions around topics associated with women’s reproduction. Sara McDougall’s work on single women and illicit pregnancy highlights the surprising range of possibilities that an unmarried mother might have faced in the fifteenth century: perhaps ostracization, punishment, or even death, but also perhaps family support, subsequent marriage, or royal mercy. Morag Martin’s research into midwifery in the Gers alerts us to the complex relationships between unmarried mothers, student midwives, medical doctors, religious sisters, and government officials in the nineteenth century. Hannah Frydman’s article on the classified ads of the French Third Republic explores the roots of the twentieth-century laws that censored information not only about abortion but also about birth control. Maud Anne Bracke’s study of the French family planning movement places its work in a global context by comparing its leaders’ approaches to French families, immigrant families, and African families from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s. Camille Robcis’s piece on French sexual politics analyzes the conflicts between human rights language and certain kinds of anthropological language in debates over medically assisted reproduction in the 1980s and 1990s. Together, these five articles illuminate the intersecting histories of gender, sexuality, and reproductive rights in the Francophone world.
—Jean Elisabeth Pedersen, University of Rochester
