Marie-Claire Chevalier, minor at center of landmark French abortion case, dies at 66

Marie-Claire Chevalier, minor at center of landmark French abortion case, dies at 66
Her acquittal for violating France’s strict anti-abortion law led to the decriminalization of abortion in 1975.

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Marie-Claire Chevalier, minor at center of landmark French abortion case, dies at 66

Her acquittal for violating France’s strict anti-abortion law led to the decriminalization of abortion in 1975.



Michèle Chevalier, center, and her 17-year-old daughter, Marie-Claire, right, leave court on Nov. 8, 1972, after a hearing in the illegal abortion case. (AFP via Getty Images)

By Phil Davison
February 11, 2022 at 9:50 p.m. EST

Marie-Claire Chevalier was a 16-year-old high school student in France when she was raped in 1971 by a schoolmate. She had an abortion, which was illegal at the time in strongly Catholic France — and likely would have resulted in a lengthy prison sentence if revealed. And it was revealed, by the 18-year-old alleged assailant in a plea deal to avoid his prosecution for auto theft. He walked free, and Chevalier went on trial in October 1972.

But a leading feminist and human rights lawyer, Gisèle Halimi, supported in the media by hundreds of French intellectuals, writers and film stars, won Ms. Chevalier’s acquittal within weeks. The case led to the decriminalization of abortion just over two years later, in January 1975. It was a historic moment for French women, almost exactly two years after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in the United States in the Roe v. Wade case.

Ms. Chevalier died of cancer Jan. 23 at a hospital in Orléans, France, according to her mother, Michèle Chevalier. She was 66.

Halimi had pointed out, in court and in the media, that until 1943 a woman could, by law, have faced beheading by guillotine for having an abortion, such was the stigma around it. Before Ms. Chevalier’s mother asked the lawyer to defend her daughter, Halimi had already been part of an abortion rights group called Choisir (Choose) and a signatory to what became known as Manifesto 343, referring to that number of notable French women calling for abortion to be legalized.

The women included existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s longtime partner and fellow writer Simone de Beauvoir, actresses Catherine Deneuve and Jeanne Moreau and writer Françoise Sagan. Many of them, including Halimi and Deneuve, said they themselves had had illegal abortions. “I chose to make it a political trial and to appeal, over the head of the magistrate, to public opinion and the country,” Halimi told the daily Le Monde in 2019.

It worked.

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Protesters from the French Women's Liberation Movement confront security forces in Paris, on Nov. 8, 1972, during the Chevalier trial. (AFP via Getty Images)

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