France's Roe v. Wade was the trial of a 16-year-old girl
"In Ireland, it is 2018. In the United States, it is 1973. In France, the sacred date for abortion rights advocates is 1972, the year of the “Bobigny trial” that helped decriminalize abortion in the country, three months before the Roe v. Wade ruling.
At the center of the trial, which captivated the French public, was Marie-Claire Chevalier, a 16-year-old girl who became pregnant when she was raped by a classmate. Marie-Claire came from a working-class family in north-central France. The young man who had raped her dealt in petty crime, and — with shocking success — turned her in to the police (for having an abortion) so he could escape charges for stealing a car.
Marie-Claire was tried in the Paris suburb of Bobigny, alongside her single-parent mother, Michèle, who’d helped her obtain an abortion, and three other female accomplices, including the abortionist.
Marie-Claire Chevalier, minor at center of landmark French abortion case, dies at 66
But the most dynamic figure in the drama was Gisèle Halimi, a French-Tunisian lawyer, activist, writer and well-known feminist who agreed to represent Marie-Claire and her co-defendants.
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By soliciting Halimi to represent them, Michèle and Marie-Claire Chevalier allowed their ordeal to be politicized and to become a symbolic moment for women’s rights. Rather than stick to the details of Marie-Claire’s case, Halimi chose to target the 1920 law that made a teenage rape victim a criminal, and in doing so turn her client’s misfortune into a groundbreaking legal precedent.
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Halimi stated in her closing argument to the all-male jury, “Half of humanity […] shall no longer accept the perpetuation of this oppression.” Her words helped convince the jurors to defy the letter of the law and award acquittals to Marie-Claire and two of her accomplices. (Her mother, Michèle, received only a symbolic fine that she never had to pay, and the abortionist a suspended one-year prison sentence.)
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Halimi died in 2020, just a few weeks before the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, arguably her close American counterpart. Her admirers are pushing for her to enter the famous Pantheon, where the most illustrious figures of the French Republic are buried.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/06/25/bobigny-trial-roe-wade-france/
Women have been regarded as second class citizens for thousands of years. It was only in the last 70 some years that actual progress started to be made.
Because of six extremist judges, the progress that has been made toward women's suffrage is being completely undone.
This is not an issue of states rights, it is an issue of human rights.
That a tribunial of mostly men are decding what rights a woman has over her own body, begs the question, what if the situation was reversed?
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