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| Simone Veil, Auschwitz survivor and abortion pioneer, dies aged 89 | Simone Veil, Auschwitz survivor and abortion pioneer, dies aged 89 |
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| Simone Veil, an Auschwitz survivor who played a leading role in legalising contraception and abortion in France, has died aged 89. | Simone Veil, an Auschwitz survivor who played a leading role in legalising contraception and abortion in France, has died aged 89. |
| Veil, an icon of French politics and the first president of the European parliament, died at home, her son Jean Veil said. | |
| In 1973, she pushed through laws to liberalise contraception, with the pill not only authorised but reimbursed by the social security system. | |
| A year later she led the charge in the national assembly for the legalisation of abortion, where she braved a volley of insults, some of them likening terminations to the Nazis’ treatment of Jews. | |
| The legislation, the Loi Veil (Veil Law), is considered a cornerstone of women’s rights and secularism in France. | |
| A staunch pro-European, Veil was elected to the European parliament in 1979, becoming the first president of the assembly. After a second term as health minister under Socialist president François Mitterrand, Veil last held major public office between 1998 and 2007, when she was a member of the constitutional council. | |
| Born Simone Jacob in the Mediterranean city of Nice, she was deported to the Nazi death camp at the age of 17 with her entire family. | |
| Her father and brother were last seen on a train to Lithuania and her mother, Yvonne, died in Belsen just before that camp was liberated in 1945. | |
| She and her two sisters, one of whom later died in a car crash, were among only 11 survivors of 400 Jewish children deported from her region. | |
| She later said it was her experiences in the Nazi concentration camps that made her a firm believer in the unification of Europe. | |
| “Sixty years later I am still haunted by the images, the odours, the cries, the humiliation, the blows and the sky filled with the smoke of the crematoriums,” Veil said in a TV interview broadcast in 2005. |