François Olivennes comes from a family of Holocaust survivors. Son of psychiatrist parents, older brother of media men Denis and Frédéric Olivennes, he fell in love with gynecology and became a renowned specialist in medically assisted procreation (PMA) for infertile couples. Committed to its expansion to female couples, not hostile to surrogacy (GPA), he claims his profession as a form of declaration of love for life.
I wouldn’t have come here if…
If my father hadn’t made an all-out war on me to study. I left home at 17 because I wanted to enter the workforce. One of my uncles had a boat shop in Arcueil (Val-de-Marne). I went to join him to work with him, we sold windsurfing boards and dinghies that we were going to try out in Trouville (Calvados). I liked it very much.
As I was staying in a small apartment that belonged to my father in the 13e arrondissement of Paris, he sent me the bailiffs to threaten to put me on the street if I didn’t go back to university. It was terribly effective: I fell into line. If he hadn’t put that pressure on me, I’d still be selling boats.
Where did your aversion to school come from?
I think I was mostly very lazy. I had already been “saved” for the first time in final year. I locked myself at home with the firm intention of never going back to high school where I was terribly bored. I had been expelled from Louis-le-Grand and, as I was rather manual, I found myself in the technical sector where I did turning, milling, industrial design. As I had disappeared, the general overseer came to my home to lecture me. I went back to high school and ended up having my baccalaureate a little pitifully.
After the dinghies, I remembered a phrase from my grandmother: “When you don’t know what to do, you go to medicine. So I enrolled in medicine. But again, it was laborious. I failed the first year, and in the second year I almost gave up again. It was painful until I did an internship with a boss that I adored, which led me definitively to medicine.
It is the encounter with gynecology…
After six years of medicine, I did an internship with Professor Emile Papiernik at the Béclère hospital and I fell in love with gynecology. What I liked was that the patients weren’t sick. Births are fun.
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