Fall, 1974. French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing puts his Health Minister, Simone Veil, in charge of a daunting task: to carry the abortion law. During three days, she will defend her text before parliamentarians with exemplary tenacity. Diane, a young journalist, makes it the subject of her first investigation and discovers — over her explorations — a considerable changing of the women’s social status.
Born in France in the 1920s, Simone Veil (Emmanuelle Devos) studied politics at Paris’s prestigious Sciences Po until she and her family were deported to the extermination camps during World War II. Though she lost her parents and a brother, Veil managed to survive both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, an experience that taught her to fight and which would prepare her for her battles for women's rights in the decades ahead. She became the driving force behind a then controversial law to legalize abortion in France in the 1970s.