France Buries Its Biggest Abortion Rights Advocate As a ‘National Hero’

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At a funeral ceremony with military honor at Les Invalides in Paris on Wednesday, President Emmanuel Macron paid respects to a woman who represents "the best of what [the country] can achieve."

He praised feminist icon Simone Veil, who died last week at age 89, for making France "better and more beautiful" and announced that the politician who crusaded for the legalization of abortion in the 1970s will be buried alongside the nation's most revered figures in Paris's Panthéon.

Veil, widely admired in France, will become just the fifth woman laid to rest in the grand mausoleum. The Panthéon, which also houses the remains of 76 men, is where writer Victor Hugo and scientist Marie Curie are buried. Online petitions calling for Veil to be placed in the Panthéon attracted thousands of signatures as they circulated after her death. Her internment there is reliant on a parliamentary act for "national heroes," according to the BBC.

Veil threw herself behind a feminist campaign to overturn France's ban on abortion, a movement that sought to reverse the stigma of pregnancy termination and reduce the number of women dying from back-alley operations. While she pushed for decriminalizing abortions, she maintained that the practice should be the exception; "the last resort for desperate situations."

She continued her crusade after being named health minister, enduring insults from colleagues who compared abortions to the Nazis' mass murder of Jews. One lawmaker accused Veil of "genocide" and another spoke of embryos "thrown into the crematorium ovens," according to AFP.

The legislation legalizing abortion that eventually passed parliament in 1974 is known as the Veil law and is—even today—considered a pillar of women's rights in France.

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