Feminist icon Simone Veil dies

Simone Veil, a French survivor of Nazi death camps and European Parliament president who spearheaded abortion rights as one of France’s most prominent woman politicians, has died. She was 89.

“May her example inspire our compatriots,” President Emmanuel Macron tweeted. Veil said it was her experiences in the Nazi concentration camps that made her a firm believer in the unification of Europe.

“The idea of war was for me something terrible,” she told The Associated Press in a 2007 interview. “The only possible option was to make peace.”Her own rise from former deportee to the head of the European Parliament was a potent symbol of that sought-after peace, she said.

Veil was best known in France for leading the heated battle to legalise abortion in the 1970s. France’s abortion rights law is still known four decades later as the “Loi Veil”.