When the verdict was announced, Chevalier was fined 500 francs and released while demonstrators shouted his name in the streets. Four people, including his mother, were charged with accomplices and acquitted.
The case, with its young protagonist and high-profile lawyer, became a case and catalyst for overthrowing the law in her feminism campaign. Among the attendees Simone Veil, French health minister and Auschwitz survivor. An avalanche endured personal attack but continued to push for change. And on January 17, 1975, France passed the Veil Law, decriminalizing abortion.
This is the United States Supreme Court’s United States Roe v. It was two years after he legalized abortion in the Wade case. As in France, he had taken another pregnant woman, a Dallas waitress named. Norma McCorvey — under the pseudonym “Jane Roe” — to defy the law and achieve a great victory for women.
While Ms. Chevalier was proud of the impact her cause had made, she was disgusted by the advertisement and avoided the idea of using it for fame or profit. “It’s not my style to build on what’s destroying me” He said in a rare interview in 2019 With the French newspaper “Libération”
Still, his story has been packaged and repackaged for public consumption by the media in a radio series, a television movie, and in theatrical productions, including a play called “Hors la Loi” (“The Lawless”) in the Comédie-Française in 2019. . A blue metal footbridge in front of Bobigny court is dedicated to his name.
But the experience has haunted her, from rape and abortion to the trial.
“Time has passed and it’s still there, buried in my memory,” he said in a 2019 interview. “One tiny thing is all it takes to wake it up.”
Marie-Claire Chevalier was born on July 12, 1955, in Meung-sur-Loire, near Orléans, into a working-class family.