“It Is Not Your Personal Concern”: Challenging Expertise in the Campaign to Legalize Abortion in France

Abstract

Sweatman examines the transcript of the November 1972 trial in Bobigny, France, in which Gisèle Halimi defended four women charged with procuring and performing an abortion. The Bobigny trial became a national media affair and facilitated the decriminalization of abortion in the Veil law of 1975. Sweatman argues that the defense used tactics of civil disobedience and radical feminist epistemology to challenge the strictly legal standards of evidence. The success of this strategy created a discursive space in which the court and a range of expert witnesses expanded the definition of expertise in ways that facilitated a feminist notion of “distress” that included social, psychological, and moral, and not only physiological, harm, leading to broader social acceptance of abortion as a right for women.