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50 years ago, General de Gaulle gave the green light to MP Lucien Neuwirth to succeed in his fight to legalize contraception. Back to the history of the contraceptive pill.
“The pill? Never… You can’t reduce women to a love-making machine”replies the general to Alain Peyreffite, judging that “if we tolerate the pill, sex will invade everything”.
For a long time, the head of state was nevertheless hostile to it. In 1965, de Gaulle, supporter of a pronatalist policy, was shocked that the left-wing candidate, François Mitterrand, dared to include the liberalization of the pill in his electoral program.
“Lulu the pill”: the deputy and supplier of contraceptives
This elected representative of the Loire knows the Head of State well, whom he joined in London in 1942. It was in the British capital that the young resistance fighter discovered the female contraceptive “gynomine” which is on free sale there. He became the official supplier to his friends in Free France, earning the nickname of “Lulu the pill”.
A few months before May 68 and its moral revolution, the general’s discreet “yes” did not put an end to the hostility of many personalities, starting with “Aunt Yvonne”, the president’s wife, Catholic associations or the ‘doctor’s orders.
Supported by the left and family planning, Mr. Neuwirth is the subject of violent attacks within his own camp, where he is treated as “gravedigger of France” and “murderer of children”. However, on July 1, 1967, his proposal to repeal a pronatalist law which since 1920 has suppressed contraception, is finally put up for discussion in the Assembly.
The 1920 text was “a law of circumstance made to compensate for the terrible haemorrhage caused by the First World War”pleads Mr. Neuwirth. “The time has now come to move from accidental motherhood to conscious and fully responsible motherhood”.
The pill, a contraceptive considered “dangerous”
“The pill is dangerous”proclaims the doctor and Gaullist deputy Jacques Hébert, underlining the lack of hindsight on the long-term effects of the pill, the first pills dating from the beginning of the 1960s. His colleague from the UDR, Jean Coumaros is worried about the ” absolute power” that women will acquire over their fertility and tries, in vain, to introduce an amendment so that the prescription of the pill is “made in agreement with the husband”.
Opponents of the pill fear a drop in the birth rate, fear a relaxation of morals and the “harmfulness” of contraceptive methods.
A law passed by 521 votes against 55
It is by exposing for 45 minutes the misery of women, mothers in spite of themselves, and the horrors of clandestine abortion that the deputy ends up winning presidential membership, he told AFP before his disappearance in 2013.
On December 19, 1967, the proposal is definitively voted in a watered down version. To have it adopted, Mr. Neuwirth uses a stratagem: a nocturnal vote, by show of hands, which makes it possible not to display the names of opponents and supporters. All the left votes for while on the right, the benches are very sparse. Result of the votes: 521 votes against 55. Finally, on December 28, De Gaulle promulgates the law. But we have to wait until 1969 to see the first application decree on the manufacture and delivery of contraceptives. The last decrees relating to the liberalization of contraception, the one authorizing the IUD and the one defining the missions of the Family Planning Centers, were only published in the spring of 1972.
The first pills will not be officially authorized for sale until 1973. To explain such slowness, Lucien Neuwirth will speak of a “deliberate sabotage” over there “administrative power” who has “blocked the preparation and publication of implementing decrees” of his law.