Le Planning

In popular fiction, France and Vamour are nearly synonymous. A foreigner attempting to enlighten the Frenchman on the subject simply invites the slings and arrows of outraged Gallic sensibility. But in fact, love and its consequences in France have a darker side: there are at least 400,000 illegal (and therefore dangerous ) abortions each year, and many authorities believe that the total is 800,000--equal to the number of live births. Authorities see a significant relation between this high abortion rate and the fact that the prescription and sale of all contraceptives is forbidden by a French law passed in 1920 in the hope of boosting the birth rate after France's tragic World War I losses.

In its effect, the 1920 law, which also makes abortion illegal, invokes a double standard. The French male can buy contraceptive devices at any pharmacy under the legalistic pretense that they are used to protect him against disease. But no French doctor can legally prescribe contraceptives for women. So strictly maintained is this ban that full-fledged gynecologists still complete their studies without ever learning that such contraceptives for women exist. "In the field of planned parenthood." said one French doctor, "France ranks on a par with Spain and Portugal. It is high time that France caught up with the other four-fifths of the world.''

"Monstrous Desire." Last week, thanks to a crusade launched by one of Paris' most respected gynecologists. Dr. Marie-Andree Lagroua Weill-Halle, the belated revolution was stirring French doctors to action and open flouting of the 1920 law. Dr. Lagroua Weill-Halle's own conversion was typical. The daughter of a Roman Catholic Lyon family, she was shocked when she made her first acquaintance with le planning through a visit to a Planned Parenthood Federation clinic in Manhattan: "The desire to avoid motherhood seemed to me monstrous." But practicing in Paris, she met thousands of women who were afraid to have another child because of poverty or threats to their own health. Many had given up marital relations to avoid pregnancy. Even more were considering abortions.

To fill in the blanks in her colleagues' medical educations, she first wrote a technical book on family planning and last year lashed out at the popular level in La Grand'peur d'Aimer (The Great Fear of Loving), with a prefatory send-off from famed Authoress Simone (The Second Sex) de Beauvoir. Its simply told case histories of women who needed to prevent unwanted pregnancies aroused the conscience of her fellow doctors. France's leading Protestant theologian, Pastor Marc Boegner, backed her; so did Authors Georges Duhamel and Gabriel Marcel. In their wake came scores of newspaper and magazine articles, radio and TV" programs. France at last awoke to Dr. Weill-Halle's crusade.

Happy Motherhood. Now a widow of 44, svelte and blonde and the mother of three. Dr. Weill-Halle has seen her volunteer movement, named Maternite Heureuse (Happy Motherhood), shoot up overnight into a major national organization, the French Movement for Family Planning. In Paris 15 physicians are already giving advice on contraception to their private patients. Even the staid French Association of Women Doctors has come around to demanding repeal of the 1920 law.

Most significant of all, in Grenoble the first family-planning clinic publicly opened its doors last month. Attracted by the slogan "A Wanted Child Is a Happy Child.'' Frenchwomen filled the clinic. Its 21 volunteer doctors can legally give only information and advice; but, increasingly, doctors are risking their professional careers to write prescriptions for female contraceptives, which still can be filled only outside France. Next step in Dr. Weill-Halle's crusade: a birth-control information center in Paris, soon to be followed by centers in each of France's major cities.

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