ABSTRACT
In 1945, French women had little control over their fertility and their reproductive processes. Laws passed in the early 1920s had prohibited not only abortion, but also the dissemination of information concerning contraception and the distribution of contraceptive material. During World War II, the Vichy regime firmly established motherhood as women’s lot, equating abortion with treason against the state and guillotining an abortionist, MarieLouise Giraud. In the decades following the war, a series of campaigns against the pronatalist climate which prevailed in France eventually afforded French women the kind of sociosexual rights in force in other European countries. Change was, however, slow in coming.
