This morning I received a message from a friend: “I don’t have the rule, I’m worried.” “In October 1963, in Rouen, I spent more than a week waiting for menstruation to come to me,” I read later in the book of Annie Ernaux "Ipuuna", translated into Basque by Joseba Urteaga for the editorial Igela. How many women, how many times, have we been in this situation? I had the event to read and the film based on this book, L'Événement (2021), directed by Audrey Diwan, has become a task of what you can see. I tried to read my friend's message as a sign.

The book narrates Ernaux's abortion in 1963, when he was a Rouen student. At that time, the termination of pregnancy was illegal in France, threatened by imprisonment, fine and a ban on residence. Reading “It helped me to know that before me many women were going to do what they had done,” the stories of some friends who have aborted came to mind and I realized that as I went through the book, I was being compared with the different stories. With a very close case I have done the exercise more deeply. In the face of this event, Enaux and my friend Miren each reacted with their instruments, writing the first one, the second one of humor.

Ernaux mentions at the beginning that he had “a confused stomach and a strange taste in his mouth”. I remember that Miren was once again enlarged in the breasts, taught me from Skype, without suspecting what was still going on, happy. The gynecologist Ernaux told her that she was pregnant and the first words she heard later were “the children of love tend to be the most beautiful”, although only at that time she was. Look at her partner, and the first thing she heard was, "Well, now we know we're fertile." Ernaux was 23 years old, Miren was 22. One did not call the pregnancy, he used “that” or “that”, while the other also called the baby, Kebin, “he has almost made a communion inside me!” because he knew very late that he was pregnant. They knew from the beginning that they would both abort.

Ernaux comments that he had the “sense of transmitted poverty”. She came from a lower social class, while the people and the world of parents were left behind and became intellectual, and her logic told her that suffering “social failure” was the most normal thing, becoming “unmarried pregnant daughter”. Look, he said, “This could not be lacking in my biography!”, somehow relating what was going on with the vulnerable social and economic situation of yours. Both received the help of the women in the area. A girl told Ernaux where to abort, the nurse who aborted him was a woman, says “my savior looked like a witch or the godfather of a brothel” and the famous one who later pulled out of a tight trap. When Miren was going to abort, in 2016, at the CAPV, from Osakidetza he moved to a private clinic to make a suspension of 300 euros. As he thought he was suspicious, he called a friend who put him in contact with another who aborted for free in Osakidetza.

Ernaux felt outside the world, couldn't find support to share what was happening to him. Everything was easier for Miren, he had support and protection at home, and the social context was, of course, different. However, during those days, he often came up with the phrase “I am pregnant”, and in those brief moments he felt away everything around him. I leave it in your hands that Dive more into the different events, both the book and the movie mentioned, are very recommendable, and Look, if you ever know it, will tell you peacefully what you have experienced. I personally love these stories because, to start with, they've been told, and besides being honest, you can't find any evidence of guilt in them.

But to conclude, I'm going to tell you a scene that doesn't appear in the movie and that caught my attention. The writer, after the clandestine abortion, had to go to the hospital, where a nurse told him “you’re much better like this!” (i.e., after abortion). The nurse discovered that Annie was a student at a good university thanks to her student card. These were the “only words of consolation” heard by the young man in the hospital, and he concluded that, rather than “complicity among women”, it was due to the “recognition of the younger people’s right to impose themselves on the laws”.