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  • Title: [A mutation in the mechanisms of social control: the case of abortion].
    Author: Horellou-lafarge C.
    Journal: Rev Fr Sociol; 1982; 23(3):397-416. PubMed ID: 12339248.
    Abstract:
    This article examines the process by which the control and suppression of abortion shifted from the judicial domain to become an object of medical control in France. Abortion was a crime under the Napoleonic Code of 1810 and remained severely punishable for a century, but the law was regarded as too severe and prosecution was lax. The prescribed punishments became less stringent in 1923 but were later toughened again. Laws against abortion did not seem fair to much of the population concerned or to many of those charged with enforcing the laws, and they did not seem to uphold any inviolable moral principle. Increasing discontent with existing abortion laws, which were felt no longer to reflect the needs or mores of the society, and moreover to penalize poor women, who could not afford medically safe abortions abroad, and a belief that the law was doing nothing to reduce the numbers of abortions were among the stimuli that prompted the search for improved legislation. The public debate about the revised abortion law and the proper role of physicians and magistrates in determing access to abortion are traced though an exposition of opinions and quotations of the major participants in the controversy. The law of 1975 removed abortion from the control of magistrates and thereby liberalized access to it, but by entrusting access to abortion to the medical profession, the law embodied a bias toward preventing abortion. New social forces were behind the 1975 law, including pressure from women's groups which were developing a new consciousness of their rights and place in society, and a new role of medical practitioners, who occupy a privileged position in a social system based on knowledge rather than property. The new law still regards abortion as an evil and attempts to discourage it by imposing numerous constraints concerning when, where, and by whom it can be performed, by not requiring health personnel or facilities to make abortion available and by limiting the number that can be performed in any 1 establishment, and by obliging the abortion seeker to complete a maze of preliminary requirements. The law, by its own inner contradictions in authorizing and at the same time condemning and attempting to suppress abortion, and by granting control of access to the medical system despite the fact that abortion is not an illness, carries the seeds of its own ultimate failure.
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