US abortion ruling puts women on alert worldwide

It was Simone Veil, the late French politician and champion of women’s rights, who pushed through the decriminalization of abortion in France in 1975.

“No woman resorts to an abortion with a light heart. One only has to listen to them: It is always a tragedy,” she told France’s parliament in 1974, a year after the U.S. Supreme Court granted federal access to abortion for American women in Roe v Wade. And while Ms. Veil suffered fierce insults and threats at the time, a woman’s right to abortion has largely been a settled affair in France for the past half-century.

That’s not to say it has not come under threat, from conservative Catholics and the far-right. But while abortion has cleaved the United States in one of the nation’s longest standing culture wars, in France it has been considered a matter of public health.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization last month rolled back abortion access for American women, however, protests have erupted in Paris and around the country that are indistinguishable from their counterparts in Minneapolis, Birmingham, Alabama, and Boston.