A woman becomes pregnant unintentionally.

She is twenty-three, comes from a working-class family, lives and studies in Rouen, and it is 1963. Abortion is illegal in France.

Anyone who nevertheless determines their own body and their future life, who for whatever reasons decides against the child growing inside them, faces a fine or imprisonment.

The woman, meanwhile a famous author of numerous autofictional novels, who describes herself as “ethnologist of herself”, is called Annie Ernaux, the book that she wrote about her abortion and which is now available in German, is called “The Event”.

Melanie Mühl

Editor in the features section.

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Perhaps the most amazing thing about this narrow story is that the author does not for a second toy with the idea of ​​having this child, with whose father she has a long-distance relationship.

She doesn't imagine what it would be like to be a mother.

In her diary there is neither “I am expecting a child” nor “I am pregnant” “and certainly not“ pregnancy ”, in French grossesse, which sounds like“ grotesque ”.

This would have meant the acceptance of a future that would not come.

It's not worth naming what I decided to get rid of.

My calendar says 'it', 'the thing', 'pregnant' only once. ”Cool-sounding sentences that have nothing to do with heartlessness, but are an expression of deep despair.

A degrading gauntlet

Annie Ernaux, hungry for knowledge, intellectually, is the first in her family to study and advance socially. She dreads a stigmatized life as an unmarried mother in which her intellectual abilities atrophy. Pregnancy separates her from her fellow students, from women with “empty bellies”. Those to whom she tells her secret meet her with voyeuristic curiosity. You look at Annie Ernaux as if she were the leading actress in a drama with an uncertain outcome. Dismayed and fascinated at the same time, they revel in their misfortune. Jean, for example, laughingly suggests that she and friends introduce a probe.

Annie Ernaux's style is sober, and she tells as precisely as her own memories, which she pursues with all her might, allow.

She doesn't shy away from shocking details.

Nothing is further from her than sentimentality.

The writing unfolds at times such a shocking force that one hesitates to turn the page to read on.

About the humiliating gauntlet in search of someone to free them from the fetus.

Instead of medical empathy, the arrogance of white-coated men who look down on women like Ernaux dominates in France in the 1960s.

Eventually she tried thick, metallic blue knitting needles herself, but the pain made her give up quickly.

In the clutches of paragraphs

In a roundabout way, she arrives at an “angel maker” in Paris who looks like a “witch” and who does the surgery for four hundred francs in her bedroom. Only after a second visit does she reject the fetus. Ernaux loses him in the dormitory, he shoots out of her like a grenade. “I saw a small baby doll hanging from my vagina on a reddish string. I had no idea that I had anything like that inside me. I took it in one hand - it was strangely heavy - and crossed the hall, holding it between my thighs. I was an animal. "

“The Event” appeared in France twenty years ago, but the story has lost none of its topicality and explosiveness, on the contrary. A look at Texas or Poland, where rigid abortion laws limit the existential freedom of women, shows that the female body is still being attempted to rule through legal provisions. It was only at the beginning of January that thousands of people in several Polish cities protested against the ban on abortion, which makes legal abortion virtually impossible - a young woman had died of septic shock because the doctors wanted to wait for the fetus to die after losing the amniotic fluid helped her.

Annie Ernaux, who loses a lot of blood in the process, also has to go to the hospital, where her uterus is scraped off.

The only guilt she ever felt in relation to this event, Ernaux writes, is that she made nothing of this experience of life and death - a debt that she has paid.

Annie Ernaux: "The Event".

Translated from the French by Sonja Finck.

Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2021. 104 pp., Hardcover, € 18.