Happening (l’événement in French)
Happening
The author wrote the story of her illegal abortion as a young woman in France in the early 1960s before abortion was legal. France is Catholic and the laws were supposedly based on religious views of fetal life, in practice the attitudes of medical workers were more influenced by their view of the woman’s social class, her future plans and potential, and what her role should be based on her social status. The author was a university student from a working-class family, and she experienced two very different judgments depending on which of these prisms people saw her through.
