Happening

a story about a time when abortion was illegal

Last week I went to see Happening at The Palm, our local art house movie theater. Based on the autobiographical book published in 2000 by Annie Ernaux, the film, directed by Audrey Diwan, takes place in France during the mid-1960s when abortion was illegal (it was legalized there in 1975). I’m going to talk about the film, which has won many awards, including the Gold Lion, the highest prize at the Venice International Film Festival, so, spoiler alert.

But not much of a spoiler here, really. After all, you know going into a film like this what’s going to happen, just as I was able to assume, if only from the title, what the main plot event would be when I went to see “4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days” about a college student in the 1980s in Romania who becomes pregnant and seeks out an illegal abortion (abortion has been legal there since 1990). In these true-to-life HARROWING films, you’re just waiting for IT, for the MAIN TORTUOUS EVENT.

It’s not much different than going to see 127 Hours, the 2010 film in which Aron Ralston, played by James Franco, falls and becomes wedged between boulders on a solitary climbing excursion in the Utah wilderness. To extricate himself from the situation, to have any hope of survival, he must cut off his own arm. You know what’s going to happen, what you are going to have to endure in your plush reclining seat, and yet you go anyway. The main difference is that upon surviving his endeavor, Ralston was hailed for his bravery and invited on talk shows. He wrote a bestselling book and became a sought-out motivational speaker. That’s the opposite of what happens to the young women who survive illegal abortions. They, in contrast, remain reticent, out of fear of reprisal, both social and legal. But there are exceptions. If you’re like Annie Ernaux, you’ll eventually write a book about it that will be made into an award-winning film.  

In Happening, the main character, Anne Duchesne, is a college student living in a dorm with other young women. She’s studying literature and determined to pass her exams so she can continue and advance her studies. She has decent and supportive working-class parents who want a better future for her. Anne is determined to have that for herself too, and she’s capable of earning it. She’s smart and loves college and literature. She wants to be a writer. She even wants to have a child someday. The problem is, Anne is about to discover she’s pregnant now.

We don’t see how or by whom at first, but the circumstances are eventually revealed. She was not raped or even coerced. She met a charming young man and their tryst left her pregnant. The male has long since returned to his town where he has continued his studies in political science, oblivious that Anne is eagerly waiting for a menstrual period that won’t come.

Finally, her doctor confirms her fear. She begs him for help, but he adamantly says he cannot help her—that they could both go to jail. Determined to end her pregnancy, she seeks out another doctor who refuses to help her initially but then gives her a prescription, which he says, will “induce menstruation,” an injection she administers into her own thigh with a syringe, plunging the needle deep into her thigh. It doesn’t work, and days later, she desperately tries to give herself an abortion using an impossibly long knitting needle. She braces herself, struggles through the pain as she tries to be thorough. She winces. She bleeds.

After the procedure, she returns to her original doctor, who informs her that the pregnancy is still intact. But there was blood!—she tells him, incredulous. Merely scratches to the uterine membrane, he tells her. But the prescription the other doctor gave me—the one to induce menstruation? she asks. He’s against abortion, her doctor tells her. The medicine he gave you wasn’t meant to end the pregnancy but to strengthen the embryo.

Anne realizes there is almost no one she can turn to for help, no one she can trust. She cannot tell her mom or her dad. She can’t even tell her best friends at first, but desperate for help, finally fesses up to them. In a sad testament to the fear the State can instill in citizens with its laws, her friends recoil, afraid to help her, afraid to even discuss it. In a later scene, one of them confesses that she had a passionate affair with an older man for a month that summer, that she could have gotten pregnant, could have ended up like Anne. In one of the most telling moments of the film, Anne’s friend says that she felt ashamed but had been overcome with desire. But the mores of the 1960s suggested that although you might have that desire, you’re certainly not supposed to act on it.  

My son Charlie, 14, asked me about the movie when his dad and I got home. When I told him that the main character got pregnant he asked if she was on birth control. No, I said. I understood the subtext of the question: Well, then, wasn’t it her fault she got pregnant? In the 1960s by taking birth control—if you could even obtain it—you’d be admitting to the intention of having sex, which was severely frowned upon. Still, even today I bristle at the she-should-have-known-better argument. It’s like having no empathy for someone dying of cancer because they were once a smoker.

As the film goes on, the weeks of Anne’s pregnancy—five weeks, six weeks, seven, eight—are noted onscreen at the beginning of each segment, a menacing countdown as she faces the myriad roadblocks intended to prevent her from ending her pregnancy. In one segment, after her attempted self-induced abortion fails, she visits the strapping young man who impregnated her. She had told him previously over the phone that she did not plan to have the baby, so when she shows up for the weekend, his expectation is vastly different from hers. I need your help! she tells him. But he makes it quite clear that there is nothing he can do other than be mad at her for ruining a perfectly good weekend by showing up still pregnant. The pregnancy isn’t his problem—it’s entirely hers.

Her grades begin to plummet. Of course she can’t concentrate on school! And the clock is ticking. She implores a male friend to help her. He’s a womanizer, and so she figures he may have faced a similar predicament. She goes to his place to discuss the situation, but he’s such a dog, he tries to get her to sleep with him—after all, there’s no risk since she’s already pregnant. She leaves, furious, but later he puts her in contact with another female student who nervously (hushed, secretive, high stakes!) gives Anne the number of a woman who provides clandestine abortions. Anne calls the woman, gets the address, and sets the date. Then she goes out to a bar the night before and, with nothing to lose in the face of her pending back-alley abortion, goes home with an acquaintance with whom she has passionate sex. Judge if you will. She doesn’t need your approval.

The next morning, Anne goes to an apartment for the abortion. The middle-aged woman is tall, thin, no nonsense. The walls are thin too, and the woman tells Anne: If you make noise or yell out, I’ll stop. Anne, who has had to sell her beloved books and other belongings to pay for the procedure, hands the woman 400 francs. They enter a bedroom, and Anne lays back on the edge of the bed with her knees up. The woman begins with a speculum; if you’ve had a pap smear, you may have experienced that cold, metal contraption opening you up wide. I don’t know of a more vulnerable feeling.

Then, as the woman continues with more apparati we can’t see, Anne whimpers, grabs her own thighs, begins to shake, and finally yelps. The woman glares at her. Of course there’s no anesthesia. It seems interminable. Gentlemen, imagine a stranger placing your ball sack into a vise grip and applying increasing pressure until you think you will scream or pass out. Imagine not being able to make a sound. Imagine not knowing how long it will last, how tight the vise will go. Imagine not knowing if the pain you’re feeling is doing you real, perhaps irreversible, damage, or if you’ll even survive. Imagine selling all your worldly possessions just to pay the privilege of that experience.

Days pass.  The abortion doesn’t work. Anne goes back. The woman nearly refuses her, saying a second procedure is profoundly risky. But Anne, increasingly desperate, is willing to risk it all. They return to the bedroom. In the next scene, Anne is walking or trying to walk down the street after leaving the woman’s apartment. She’s finally beginning to miscarry. Sweating, stumbling, almost collapsing from pain, she makes it to her dorm room. In bed, she groans and doubles over with pain and finally screams. She thinks she is dying because she is. A fellow student in the dorm reluctantly helps her (helping could mean jail) as she finishes miscarrying. It’s bloody and visceral and terrible and terrifying. But she won’t stop bleeding.

She’s transported to the hospital, the very place she’s tried to avoid through the entire ordeal, the very place that’s meant to save your life but could end up ruining it. The medical staff can condemn you if they manage to keep you alive. This moment is just as important and harrowing as the abortion itself; so much hangs in the balance. Anne, barely conscious on a gurney, hears the nurse ask the attending doctor, “How should I label it?”

If he says abortion, she will go to prison, and all will be for naught.

“Miscarriage,” he says.

In the next scene, she is entering a classroom to take her final exam.

According to author Annie Ernaux’s bio, she had an illegal abortion, finished her studies and started writing. She became a teacher, which allowed her to move from working class to middle class. She married, had two sons, divorced, and retired from teaching at 60 to fully dedicate herself to writing. She’s written more than 20 books, mostly about her own life. She’s 82 now. I’d invite her on my talk show if I had one.

I knew when I saw the film posted on The Palm’s website last week that I would go see it, and I assumed I would go see it alone. Instead, my spouse, Derek, accompanied me. At The Palm we bought our tickets and entered the theater just as the previews were starting. It was completely empty, devoid of patrons, which was eerie but also good: Derek had a visceral reaction to some scenes, sometimes turning away or rocking forward, squirming in discomfort himself as he watched the protagonist suffer; other scenes he saw none of, as the aperture between his fingers allowed no daylight whatsoever. Aren’t I a fun date? I know how to show a guy a good time.

When we emerged after the film, the sky was dark, and Derek asked me, Did you rig that—did you make that happen? Did you reserve the entire theater just for us? He pointed out that there was no sign that the movie had been there, no poster advertising it, no title on the marquee. And we’d been the only ones watching. I deduced that that since it was the last night the film was showing, the Palm people had changed the marquee and posters for the films that would begin the following day, Friday. But it was as if Happening never happened.

Last week, Governor Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma signed legislation that bans all abortion, with exceptions made only to save the life of the mother or for incest  or rape that has been reported to law enforcement. The bill was copied from the Texas ban, which avoids judicial review by letting ordinary citizens file lawsuits against anyone who abets an abortion. The Oklahoma law goes farther though—because instead of a ban at six weeks, which shocked the nation, the Oklahoma ban begins at conception. It could be years before we learn of many of the ramifications of the law, and we will never fully know the consequences.

Will the exception for rape or incest mean the incident will have to be not only reported but proved? That may be a moot point, as a third abortion law heading to the governor this summer provides no exception for rape or incest.

By the end of this month, the U.S. Supreme Court will issue its decision for Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that arose from a Mississippi law that bans abortion at 15 weeks. If the leaked draft opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito gives any indication of the Court’s leanings, Roe v. Wade will likely be overturned.

A few days after asking me about whether Anne was taking birth control, Charlie asked me why the film was titled Happening. The French word is “L'événement”—literally, the event—but for our times, Happening feels dreadfully apropos.

This. Is. Happening.

Thanks for reading.