Happening

by Annie Ernaux

As was often the case, you couldn’t tell whether abortion was banned because it was wrong or wrong because it was banned. People judged according to the law, they didn’t judge the law.

I feel that the woman who is busying herself between my legs, inserting the speculum, is giving birth to me. At that point I killed my own mother inside me.

The distress I experience on recalling certain images and on hearing certain words is beyond comparison with what I felt at the time: these are merely literary emotions; in other words they generate the act of writing and justify its veracity.)

Whenever I think about my abortion in the bathroom, the same image invariably springs to mind: a bomb or a grenade erupting, the bung of a casket popping. My inability to use different words and this definitive coupling of past events with specific images barring all others, are no doubt proof that I truly experienced such events in this particular manner.)

Girls who abort and unwed mothers from working-class Rouen were handed the same treatment. In fact, they probably despised her even more.

“I’m no fucking plumber!” In my mind, this sentence continues to split the world in two, ramming home the distinction between, on the one hand, doctors, on the other, workers or women who abort, between those who rule and those who are ruled.)

The only reason why he was ashamed—I found out that night—was that he had treated a college student like an ordinary salesgirl or a factory worker because he knew nothing about me.

I felt no different from the women in the next room. In fact, I was probably wiser because of the abortion. In my student bathroom, I had given birth to both life and death. For the first time I felt caught up in a line of women, future generations would pass through us.

Now I know that this ordeal and this sacrifice were necessary for me to want to have children. To accept the turmoil of reproduction inside my body and, in turn, to let the coming generations pass through me.

Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.