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This post refers to the judicial execution of a French woman under the Vichy regime for performing abortions. Shared solely for historical education and to honour the long struggle for women’s reproductive rights.

The Last Woman Guillotined in France for Abortion – Marie-Louise Giraud (1903–1943)

On the morning of 30 July 1943, outside La Roquette prison in Paris, 39-year-old Marie-Louise Giraud became the last woman in France ever executed for performing abortions, and the last woman guillotined during the collaborationist Vichy regime.

Born into poverty in Normandy in 1903, Marie-Louise worked as a cleaner and laundress. After the German occupation in 1940, with her sailor husband absent and food rations desperately short, she began renting rooms to women in Cherbourg and, between 1940 and 1942, carried out abortions on at least 27 women who could not feed another child in wartime conditions. One patient died from complications.

In October 1942 an anonymous letter denounced her. Under Vichy’s ultra-conservative “National Revolution” and the Law of 15 February 1942, abortion had been reclassified as a crime against the state punishable by death. Tried by a special State Tribunal in June 1943, she was sentenced to the guillotine. Marshal Philippe Pétain personally refused clemency.

At 05:32 on 30 July 1943, Marie-Louise Giraud was executed by the French state executioner Jules-Henri Desfourneaux. She remains the only person in modern French history executed solely for performing abortions.

Thirty-two years later, on 17 January 1975, Minister of Health Simone Veil – an Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor – successfully passed the law that legalised abortion in France (Loi Veil). During the parliamentary debate she explicitly recalled the women who had been condemned to death under Vichy for the same act she was now decriminalising.

We remember Marie-Louise Giraud today not to nurture hatred, but to honour the countless women who, in times of war and hardship, risked everything to help others exercise control over their own bodies; to recognise that laws written in the name of morality can become instruments of cruelty; and to celebrate the courage of those like Simone Veil who turned personal survival into lasting justice for all women in France.

Official & reputable sources

Archives Nationales de France – Tribunal d’État de la Seine, dossier Marie-Louise Giraud (1943)

Vergès, Jacques – De la stratégie judiciaire: l’affaire Giraud (Éditions de Minuit, 1968)

Szpiner, Francis – Une affaire de femmes (Balland, 1986) – basis for Claude Chabrol’s 1988 film

Journal Officiel de la République Française – Law of 15 February 1942 & Law of 17 January 1975 (Loi Veil)

Mémorial de la Shoah – testimony and biography of Simone Veil