Reproductive Rights in Modern France: Feminism, Contraception, and Abortion, 1950-1980

The introduction of the principle of women’s reproductive liberty in France, tentatively by the family planning movement after 1960 and explicitly by the women’s liberation movement after 1970, marked a deep shift, transforming public discourses. Yet this principle remained fiercely contested, and moderate and conservative actors responded by foregrounding notions of ’reproductive responsibility’, or the expectation that individuals perform the ’right’ sexual and family-making behaviour, benefiting not only themselves and their families, but the nation at large. Such responsibilisation underpinned the legal reforms of the 1960s-70s, framing a notion of reproductive citizenship based on a tension between individual rights and social norms.

This book breaks new ground by taking an intersectional approach to the defining moments of this period: the legalisation of contraception (the laws of 1967 and 1974) and the liberalisation of abortion (1975, 1979). Drawing on a wide range of sources and actors - including feminist and family planning movements, government actors, demographers, medical-professional organisations, disability rights groups, and key actors in the overseas departments - Maud Bracke demonstrates how the discourse of responsibilisation allowed actors to distinguish between citizens ’worthy’ of reproductive rights and those seen as less worthy. Bracke analyses the distinct regulations regarding contraception in the overseas departments of Guadeloupe and Martinique, framed by racialised anti-natalism. The book also demonstrates that disability rights organisations contributed to the discrediting of the notion of ’eugenic abortion’, used among experts and policy-makers until the early 1970s. Furthermore, Bracke goes on to highlight the silence in the feminist movement around both disability rights and race as part of its universalisation of women’s conditions of oppression, and analyses the emergence of Black Feminism in late-1970s France. In so doing, the book offers a major contribution to the history of sex, gender, family life, healthcare, demography, and political debate in post-war France, and more generally.

Maud Anne Bracke, Professor of Modern European History, University of Glasgow

Maud Bracke is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Glasgow. She is an editor of The Journal of Modern European History and sits on the editorial boards of Gender & History and Europe-Asia Studies. She has published widely on the history of feminism and women’s rights in modern Europe, including La nuova politica delle donne (Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2019) and Women and the Reinvention of the Political: Feminism in Italy (Routledge, 2014).