Daniel Balvet, a doctor in the early 1970s, recalls how he performed abortions in a clandestine centre or in the homes of other activists in the Lyon region. "I didn't want them to wreck themselves with knitting needles," says another abortionist, Dominique Broyer, who reveals how she welcomed women to her weekly clinic who had come to terminate a pregnancy "completely illegally" before the passing of the Veil Act on 17 January 1975 which decriminalised abortion in France. IMAGES AND SOUNDBITES