Simone Veil will rest in the Pantheon among great people. Alas, the former minister did pass away at the age of 89 on 30 June 2017. But she will leave in everyone’s heart an indelible memory thanks to her many achievements

Over the years, she has lived several lives: deported to the concentration camps, twice Minister of Health, first woman President of the European Parliament elected by direct universal suffrage …. It was also a forerunner in many fields. Very early on, she supported the Franco-German reconciliation despite the loss of her parents in the death camps. She already viewed it as a means of avoiding a third world war. She was European at heart and said in 2008 about the realization of this Union: “When I look at the past sixty years, this is what has been done best.”

She refused to be confined to the role of a housewife. And it was her struggle for women’s rights that made her famous. At a time when the right to voluntary interruption of pregnancy is called into question by some, the difficulty of this struggle becomes obvious especially for a woman from a bourgeois and conservative background. Such courage is to be welcomed. Mutual societies have also played a very important role in the legalization of abortion, notably through their prevention, information and care activities, because the financial fragility of women constitutes an obstacle to the implementation of this law.

Simone Veil is also behind the creation of the “hospital package” still in force, as well as increases in contributions for active employees over 65, and the 70% to 40% reduction in the reimbursement of non-essential medicines “. Less well known, her achievements to clean up the social security and make up the deficit of the disease branch, were also courageous since it was a matter of limiting health expenditure. However, those measures target insured persons without questionning the logic of a liberal medicine and of the pharmaceutical industry, among others, which were insufficiently regulated and hardly obliged to save its socialised resources

Even if Simone Veil passed away, her action remains a vital force. As Thierry Beaudet, President of the MGEN Group, says, “even today, Simone Veil’s commitment, her humanist discourse and her activism inspire us.”