84

Between 1965 and 1975 French physicians and biologists signed numerous articles, essays, and petitions in favor or against a repeal of the 1920 French abortion law. Taking this literature as a starting point, this article explores the role of biomedical expert opinion in the French abortion debate. The first section discusses the opposed stands taken by Jérôme Lejeune and Jacques Monod. Rather than looking at religious or general political commitments to explain their engagement, the article focuses on their research trajectories and their conflicting visions of genetics and its medical uses. The second section addresses the construction of expert assessment within four settings: the National Population Council, the French Family Planning Association, a gathering of physicians arguing for reform called the National Association for the Study of Abortion, and the leftist Health Information Group which publicly organized illegal abortions. On that basis, one may distinguish four types of engaged scientists, i.e. the institutional expert, the moral patron, the engaged professional, and the technician helping women activists. The latter was a new character close to what Michel Foucault once described as “specific intellectual”. In conclusion, the emergence and later transformation of these forms of engagement is interpreted in terms of: a) the changing relationships between science and society triggered by the social critique of the 1970s, and b) the new forms of biomedical management of reproductive choices that supplanted expert advice linked to State management of the population.