Body of unbearable truth

• Published date: 09 April 2022
• Publication title: Mix, The

In a library, in France, in the 1960s, a young woman glances over her shoulder before opening a textbook to inspect a cross-section of a pregnant female body. A succession of nested U shapes show the way the uterus expands as the foetus grows. The foetus looks like a lima bean with legs. Someone comes; the young woman shields the book from view

‘‘Before you could ask questions on the internet, everything that happened inside the body was a mystery,’’ says Audrey Diwan, the director of the film Happening, in which this scene appears early on.

‘‘Something is taking place inside her body, her body is doing this work, but she doesn’t understand anything about it.’’

Happening, which won the Golden Lion award for best film at the Venice film festival last year, is adapted from the searing 2000 autobiography L’Evenement by Annie Ernaux, one of France’s most acclaimed authors. In it she recounts her illegal abortion in 1963. The young woman in the library, Anne, is a literature student from a working-class background; the unwanted pregnancy occurs just as the year is drawing to a close and she is studying for her exams. It jeopardises everything she — and by extension, her parents, who are supporting her unusual ambitions — has been working for.

‘‘I’m pregnant,’’ she says to one doctor she consults. ‘‘I want to continue my studies. It’s essential for me.’’ He kicks her out of his office, prescribing medication ‘‘to make your period return’’, which, it later emerges, is actually used to strengthen the embryo.

The word abortion isn’t uttered once.

In France, in some ways still a deeply Catholic, conservative country, abortion wasn’t legalised until 1975; a young woman who found herself in trouble and didn’t want to give birth had very few options. Anyone who helped her — a doctor, a friend, an abortionist (what they used to call a faiseuse-d’anges, or angel-maker) — could go to jail, and the doctor would lose their licence.

And jail wasn’t even the worst thing that could happen to a young woman who obtained an illegal abortion. In a scene with the doctor who first informs Anne that she’s pregnant, she implores him to do something.

‘‘You can’t ask me that,’’ he says. ‘‘Not me, not anyone. The law is unsparing. Anyone who helps can end up in jail. You too. And only if you’re spared the worst. Every month a girl tries her luck and dies in atrocious pain. You don’t want to be that girl.’’

In Ernaux’s book, the text moves back and forth between the events of 1963 and...