The hospital was under construction, disfigured by construction huts, bags of cement, rubble, but the garden was diligently maintained. It showed off an array of spring flowers surrounding a fountain. A few patients passed our inglorious procession with lowered heads, probably knowing, in order to be witnesses to it every day, the somewhat bucolic reason for our walk. (…) I felt the first contractions. The sensation was strange, as if the molecules of mifegyne, otherwise known as RU 486, were feeling the inside of my stomach. I was going to give birth to nothing, but I was going to give birth anyway. Marie begins a promising career in television when she becomes pregnant. Abortion seems a simple and minor solution in a country where it is practiced by more than 220,000 women every year. But by expelling her fetus, it is from her entire existence that Marie extracts herself. Of her sister whom she thought she knew, of her job where she was judged, of the child's father, one of her passing lovers, and finally of herself and her childhood dreams; if abortion is legal, it is nonetheless often experienced in guilt and shame. A tiny ball of blood expelled in a hospital yard can change a life. In a society where tolerant laws do not always change mentalities, where moral positions do not always make it possible to understand behavior and choices, one can wonder, as one of the characters in the book does, if this system is not not become totally “against nature”. This luminous and incisive short novel, far from being an untimely testimony for or against abortion, is a violent metaphor on the divorce of the intimate and the social. Life drive and death drive confront each other in a torn dialectic, where the culprits are not men, but a system that promotes general incommunicability. This poignant tragedy in three acts plunges into the heart of current events: in January 2005, the Veil law will be, like the heroine of the book, thirty years old... For the first time, a woman and a man collaborate to evoke in a novel with a psychological, social and economic dimension, the taboo of abortion.