On July 5, 1974, Simone Veil was appointed Minister of Health in the government of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. She was 46, a lawyer, a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and she had exactly one major legislative objective: legalize abortion in France.

Veil introduced the law on January 26, 1975, to a National Assembly that was overwhelmingly male and significantly hostile. During the debate, deputies compared her to Nazi doctors. Several invoked the Holocaust — directing those comparisons at a woman who wore her Auschwitz tattoo on her left forearm. She stood at the podium and continued speaking.

The law passed. It legalized abortion in France for the first ten weeks of pregnancy, with a conscience clause for physicians. It was a compromise, and Veil knew it. It was also something that had not existed before.

She had survived Auschwitz with her mother and sister; her mother died of typhus after liberation. Her father and brother were killed. She spoke rarely about the camp in public. When asked why she had chosen health and specifically abortion law, she said the women dying in back-alley procedures were a preventable catastrophe, and she knew what preventable catastrophe looked like.

Veil was elected to the Académie française in 2008. She died in 2017.