How 85-year-old survived a backstreet abortion that shaped the rest of her life
The French Nobel literature laureate is talking about an illegal abortion that nearly ended her life in 1963.
She was a 23-year-old student with ambitions to become a writer. But as the first in a family of labourers and shopkeepers to go to university, she could feel her future slipping away.
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“Sex had caught up with me, and I saw the thing growing inside of me as the stigma of social failure,” she wrote later.
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Her one-word diary entries, as she waited for her period, read like a countdown to doom: RIEN. NOTHING.
Her options were to induce an abortion herself or find a doctor or backstreet abortionist who would do it at a price. The latter, usually women, were known as “angel-makers”.
But it was impossible to get any information. Abortion was illegal, and anyone involved – including the pregnant woman herself – could go to prison.
“It was secret; nobody talked about it,” the 85-year-old says. “The girls of the time absolutely did not know how an abortion happened.”
Ending the silence
Ernaux felt abandoned – but she was also determined. When writing about this time, she wanted to show how much strength it took to face this problem.
“Really it was a battle of life and death,” she says.
In plain, factual language, Ernaux describes the events in unflinching detail in her book, Happening.
“It’s the detail that matters,” she says.
“It was the knitting needle I brought back from my parents’ house. It was also that when I finally miscarried, I didn’t know that there would be a placenta to pass.”
She was rushed to hospital, haemorrhaging, from her university dormitory.
“It was the worst violence that could be inflicted on a woman. How could we have let women go through this?” she says. “I wasn’t ashamed to describe all that. I was motivated by the feeling that I was doing something historically important.
“I realised that the same silence that had reigned over illegal abortion was carried over to legal abortion. So I said to myself, ‘All this is going to be forgotten.'”
Happening, published in 2000, is now on the school syllabus in France and has been made into a multi-award-winning film.
