In November 1974, the French minister for health, Simone Veil, rose to address the national assembly and to propose a law legalising abortion. For the next three days, she fought a tremendous battle under the eye of the media. Outside the assembly, “Let them live” campaigners distributed leaflets containing terrible illustrations, and a number of women, led by a priest, walked in procession reciting prayers.

The measure was the most controversial in France for many years, and the situation politically complicated. Within the government, the prime minister, Jacques Chirac, was not in favour of the projected law, and the minister for justice, who was absent from the assembly, had pronounced that, for him, “abortion means death”. The president of the republic, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, had insisted on the law, but not succeeded in persuading his followers. The project was passed only because the opposition endorsed it. This was considered a triumph for Veil, who has died aged 89, and, despite her protests, the law became widely known as “la loi Veil”.

The story went that when Giscard became president in April 1974 he visited Antoine Veil, a civil servant who had become a powerful figure in the aeronautical industry, to invite him to join the government. Instead he chose Antoine’s wife, Simone. She had had a distinguished career as a magistrate. After qualifying at the Paris Law Faculty, marrying Antoine in 1946 and having three sons, she became a magistrate in 1956. Very soon she was advising successive ministers for justice (including François Mitterrand) and was involved in the case of Djamila Bouhired, a young woman tortured in an Algerian prison, whom she brought to safety in France.

In 1970 Veil became the first female secretary general of the council of the magistrature. One of her main preoccupations during this period was adoption: in 1969, with two doctors, she had produced a book examining its medical, psychological and social aspects. She also joined the administrative council of French radio and television.

She therefore had a wide range of experience by the time she became minister for health in 1974. After her triumph on the abortion question, she turned to a whole series of other problems, and in 1976 she also took charge of social security. She was responsible for reform of the syllabus in medical studies; led a vigorous (although largely unsuccessful) campaign against smoking; set out to make hospitals places where there was more humanity and less administrative rigour; and tackled the problem of doctors removing organs from deceased patients for the purposes of research. While she remained popular, she also gained a reputation for being impatient and over-exacting.

In 1979 Giscard had another task for Veil: the first elections were due to be held for the European parliament, and the president wanted her to head his party’s list. She readily accepted, since she strongly believed in the need to create a unified Europe.

Daughter of Yvonne (nee Steinmetz) and André Jacob, she was born in Nice into a Jewish family. They were not devoutly religious, but Simone became bitterly aware of her Jewishness when the local lycée was closed to her, and her father, an architect, was prevented from practising. Simone, her eldest sister, Milou, and her parents were arrested in 1944, just after Simone had sat the baccalauréat exam. She, her mother and sister were sent to the concentration camp at Auschwitz, then to Bergen-Belsen, where her mother died. Her brother, Jean, and father were deported and could not be traced. Another sister, Denise, who had been in the resistance, was sent to Ravensbrück camp.

Veil could not understand how the war had come about. Why did one European country have to make war on another? On her liberation, she discovered other injustices. Denise, with others who had been in the resistance, was honoured. Those who had simply suffered were ignored or, in some cases, made the subject of jokes. In 1950, Veil was at a reception given by the French consulate in Mainz, Germany. She bore the Auschwitz camp number that the Germans had tattooed on her arm, and a French diplomat, seeing this, frivolously asked if it was her cloakroom number. Veil burst into tears. She always struggled against the reluctance of people to believe that the Jews had been persecuted by the Germans and by the French simply because they were Jews.

The European elections of 1979 brought her to the parliament in Strasbourg and she was elected its president, occupying the post until 1982. She became even more devoted a European, insisting that there should be more than economic union.

Back in France, Veil showed a reluctance to commit to any political party. She was alarmed by the growth of the far-right Front National and by the Gaullists occasionally making local alliances with it. Remaining hostile to the communists, she was tempted to join the moderate socialist government formed by Michel Rocard in 1988. Eventually she became minister for social affairs in the government of Edouard Balladur, from 1993 to 1995. There she was able to give financial help to women who wanted to leave work to look after their children, but she was in complete opposition to the extension of the powers of the state to control immigration. In 1998 she was appointed to the Constitutional Council of France.

When not in office, she and her husband took part in discussion clubs and exercised an influence on many politicians. Poor health in later years led her to abstain from playing a direct role in the political scene. Among many honours, she was made an honorary dame in 1998, was elected to the Académie Française in 2008, and received the grand cross of the Légion d’honneur in 2012. Her memoir, Une Vie, was published in 2007.

Antoine died in 2013, and her son Claude-Nicolas in 2002. She is survived by her other sons, Jean and Pierre-François.

• Simone Veil, lawyer and politician, born 13 July 1927; died 30 June 2017

• Douglas Johnson died in 2005

• This article was amended on 30 June 2017. Simone Veil’s sister Denise did not survive her, but died in 2013.